Italian best-selling author Giuseppe Genna has been familiar with San Bernardino alle Ossa since his childhood. Inside the Milanese Baroque church, built in the second half of the 17th century, he was particularly impressed by the human bones – retrieved from an ancient nearby cemetery – used to decorate the niches, pillars, doors and frieze of a chapel.

“Three hundred meters from the Duomo, the walls of the church are not built in stone but rather in human skulls. A sacred ossuary, an ossified sacrarium. A baroque church, a double howitzer hidden in the shadow of the cathedral. The skulls watch you, walled dead.”