Milan & Pavia

Known to the ancient world as Mediolanum, the great northern city of Milan was, for a crucial century, the true seat of imperial power, the place where emperors chose to govern, build, and ultimately be buried, as the eternal city itself became too distant and too vulnerable to hold the reins of a crumbling world. On this tour we trace the extraordinary legacy of that late imperial moment, from the vast basilicas commissioned by the Emperor Theodosius to the mausoleum chapels that still shelter the bones of Milan's early martyrs. And the story does not belong to Milan alone. For nearly two hundred years Pavia served as the capital of the Lombard kingdom, the seat of a Germanic dynasty that had swept away the last vestiges of Roman rule in the north. The Lombards left their mark on Pavia in its churches, its street plan, and above all in the magnificent Basilica of San Michele Maggiore, where their kings were crowned and where the stones still bear the extraordinary carved ornament of that half-forgotten world.