My travel plans did not end up as smooth as I like today. There were no trains between Milan and Geneva, more specifically, no seats on trains on this Friday. So I ended up taking a bus, and the early bus I wanted was also full.
This meant I had to take the late bus, that leaves at 17:00 (it was a half hour late in addition.). And since the train from Florence was on time at just ahea of 1 PM, I had four hours.
So I went online and booked tickets to the Duomo, or Cathedral. I booked the full package, the church, archeological site underneath, and the roof. Pics above.
There are a couple important church history things here. It’s a connection with St. Augustine. Augustine was baptized in this. Cathedral, in fact the archeological site above IS of the baptistery in which both St Ambrose (the bishop who baptized Augustine) and Augustine were baptized. Yes. That is a picture of it right there.
Milan’s Christian community is quite ok. A list of bishops of this Cathedral in the church lists bishops all the way back to AD 51. Yes, that is before Peter and Paul were martyred, before any church in Rome, indeed while Paul was beginning to write letters to people like the Thessalonians and Galatians, and some were still dealing with the loss of Jesus.
Construction on this church started in 1386 and finished in 1965. Almost 6 full centuries. An think about its start! 1386 was 21 years before the monk Luther would nail his 95 theses to the famous door in Wittenberg, and start the Protestant reformation. As this church grew, so did the conversation about how to be church, in the contentious and sometimes bloody transformation of the Christian Church into something other than it was (and the reformation and the responding counter-reformation changed both the Potestand and Catholic Church.).
It was very cool to be where Augustine was baptized. It was also cool to see this church again and do the walk on the roof again.
Tomorrow: Reformed Church of John Calvin in Geneva.
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