BASILICA OF SAINT EUSTORGIO

From the time of Eustorgio, there are remains of a primitive church that was later enlarged but it is with the assignment of the basilica to the Dominican friars in 1220 that the basilica takes on its current appearance, with three naves, with cross vaults of equal height and pillars enriched with decorations. On the north side of the basilica was built the bell tower, completed in 1309 which was among the first to be equipped with a clock, and a large convent where St. Thomas Aquinas and Peter of Verona stayed. The latter, killed at the hands of a heretic, is buried here in a sumptuous marble ark by Balduccio da Pisa and a masterpiece of fourteenth-century sculpture.
The fame of the place meant that along the southern side, until the second half of the fifteenth century, the Milanese nobles built the family chapels with sumptuous monuments and pictorial cycles.  In 1462-68 the Florentine banker Pigello Portinari had a chapel built behind the apse of the Basilica with a central plan and a high dome, a remarkable example of Renaissance architecture in northern Italy, enriched with terracotta reliefs and frescoed with scenes from the life of St. Peter Martyr by Vincenzo Foppa.