Chiesa di San Carlo al Lazzaretto

In Milan's Porta Venezia district, the Chiesa di San Carlo al Lazzaretto stands on the ground of the city's former quarantine enclosure. The Lazzaretto opened in the late fifteenth century to isolate plague sufferers, and a modest altar stood at its centre.

After the plague of 1576, Cardinal Carlo Borromeo commissioned Pellegrino Tibaldi to design a more substantial church on that ground. Tibaldi answered with an octagon open on all sides, so the sick could follow the services from a safe distance. Ionic stone columns carry the building, and a central dome with a lantern crowns it. In the late eighteenth century the French conquest of Milan turned the Lazzaretto over to military use. Under the Cisalpine Republic, Giuseppe Piermarini then recast the church as a Temple of the Fatherland, and its original dome came down. Demolition threatened in the late nineteenth century, but a restoration followed, and the church reopened in 1884.

Since a meticulous restoration in 2017, the building has served as both a place of worship and a concert hall. A new organ with 1,800 pipes arrived in the same campaign, built with the church's acoustics in mind. In 2020 the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson staged his performance The Sky in a Room there, echoing its role in past epidemics.