In a quiet plebeian quarter, remote from the bustle of the city, surrounded by a wide piazza and a pleasant grove of lime-trees, stands the old basilica of St. Ambrogio. It is reached in a few minutes from the Duomo by the S. Vittore tram. This church, architecturally and historically, ranks first among all in Milan. The Duomo, foreign in material and bastard in style, cannot compare in interest with this grand product of the Lombard soil and the Lombard spirit. The story of St. Ambrogio reaches back through the long centuries of Milan’s modern and mediæval life to the time of the saintly Doctor himself. It was in 386 that St. Ambrose founded it beside the already existing basilica Faustæ. Here he buried, in the place which he had prepared for himself, the bodies of the martyr saints Protasio and Gervasio, whose resting-place had been revealed to him just at the crisis of his struggle with the Empress. _Two men of marvellous stature such as the first age bore_, so he describes the bodies in a letter to his sister Marcellina. _We carried them, as the evening was falling, to the basilica Faustæ.... The following day we removed them to the church which they call Ambrosianam._ They were laid beneath the altar, _where Christ is offered up_, and Ambrose commanded that when his own time came he should be buried in all humility beside them upon their left hand. The church was dedicated to the martyrs. Nevertheless, it continued to be called the Basilica Ambrosiana according to the fashion of that day, when the churches were called after their founders, as for example the Basilica Faustæ, otherwise S. Vittore in Cielo d’Oro, the Basilica Porciana, also dedicated to S. Vittore, and the Basilica Paulina, or SS. Felix and Nabor. To later centuries it has become unalterably Sant Ambrogio.