Chiesa di Santa Maria in Strada

Along the old road that once ran from Monza toward Milan stands one of the loveliest brick facades of Lombard Gothic. Santa Maria in Strada — the church "in the road" — was raised between 1348 and 1368 for a community of Franciscan tertiaries, and its terracotta frontage of false loggias and delicate relief still stops pedestrians in the narrow street.

Why it matters

Monza's cathedral quarter tends to absorb all the attention, which makes this church the better surprise. The cathedral museum's own documentation — which follows the city's medieval churches — records that Santa Maria in Strada was built between 1348 and 1368 to a design by Ambrogio da Milano, promoted by a community of Franciscan tertiaries who had reduced a pre-existing building to an oratory, along the road that gave the church its name. Its gabled facade, restored in 1870 but faithful in ornament, is judged one of the finest of Lombard Gothic, and its design dialogue is telling: the decoration looks both to Giovanni di Balduccio, active in Milan in those decades, and to Matteo da Campione's facade of Monza Cathedral — the two poles of fourteenth-century taste in this city.

What to notice

The facade is a composition in cotto, or terracotta, with a false loggia and relief carving in the openings. The stone Madonna and Child above the portal is a copy; the fifteenth-century original was removed in 1995 and is now in the Museo e Tesoro del Duomo. Two late-fourteenth-century frescoes from beside the portal, including an Annunciation in the style of Giusto de' Menabuoi, are also preserved there. The single-aisle interior was remodelled in the eighteenth century.

Context and history

The church's story runs with the religious orders of the late Middle Ages. After the Franciscan tertiaries, it passed in 1393 to the Augustinians of the convent of San Marco in Milan, and their long tenure explains the belt on the Madonna statue, a probable reference to the Augustinian devotion of the Madonna della Cintola, whose cult was approved in 1439. The interior of 1756 gave the church its present Baroque-facing arrangement, and the restoration of 1870 recovered the facade's Gothic character at a time when Lombardy was revaluing its medieval heritage. What survives is a rare complete statement: fabric, facade, sculpture and fresco fragments all still legible, with the displaced works preserved a few streets away in the cathedral museum.