Santa Maria del Carmine, Milan

At the entrance to the historic Brera quarter is the church dedicated to S. Maria del Carmine. It was built in 1400 for Gian Galeazzo Visconti on an old Carmelite instituition which was abandoned because of the neighbouring castle in construction. Planned by Bernado da Venezia according to a typical square design, already used by the architect for the church del Carmine di Pavia, the building had many interruptions that lasted until 1456 with the intervention of Pietro Solari. Transformed in the Baroque era, the church was brought back to gothic form by the radical intervention of the architects Giuseppe Pestagalli (1826-39) and Carlo Maciachini (1880) who also planned the facade, and Ambrogio Annoni in 1912. Inside the church, the sculptures, paintings and wooden inlay from the 15th-17th centuries, are all of note and there are two surviving cloisters in which fragments of roman and medieval sculptures can be found as well as parts from the fifteenth century which come from sepulchral monuments which were once in the church.