Santa Maria al Paradiso

Santa Maria al Paradiso stands on Corso di Porta Vigentina in Milan, presenting a church founded in 1590. Its Neobaroque façade, completed by Ernesto Pirovano in 1897, rises in two levels above three portals. Bas-reliefs show the Marriage of the Virgin and the Nativity of Jesus. Three upper windows include a central Serliana, flanked by angel statues.

Inside, a single nave extends beneath a barrel vault, with four chapels on each side. Painted bands of cherubs and garlands preserve traces of seventeenth-century decoration. Ferdinando Porta’s eighteenth-century Assumption of Mary fills the vault, replacing an earlier painting by Andrea Pellegrini. Girolamo Chignoli’s Miracle of the Angels and Saint Bonaventure is among the chapel works. A deep Crucifix chapel carries a dome built between 1733 and 1737.

The presbytery holds an early twentieth-century marble altar and a painted wooden statue of Our Lady of Sorrows. In the nave floor, the Tredesin de Mars stone connects the church with Milanese Christian tradition. According to tradition, Saint Barnabas planted a cross there on 13 March 51 AD. Antonio Brunelli’s organ, built in 1827, remains in its original form on the presbytery’s right wall.