It was in St. Ambrogio that Gian Galeazzo Visconte, newly created Duke of Milan, knelt before the altar while the Archbishop of Milan and a splendid array of prelates chanted hymns and offices in celebration of his elevation to the ducal dignity, in the presence of princes and ambassadors from all the States of Italy and Europe. Here, in 1477, the young Republicans who had sworn to avenge the wrongs of their city upon the tyrant Galeazzo Maria Sforza, bowed themselves before the image of the Saint, patron of the Milanese liberties, and besought his blessing upon their enterprise. In the sixteenth century St. Ambrogio was the goal of the pathetic penitential processions which used to wind their way from the Duomo day after day during the visitations of the plague and the persecutions by the Spaniards. The Basilica as we see it now shows no trace, it need hardly be said, of the church which Ambrose himself built. But it still contains his bones. An interesting proof of his actual burial there beside the two martyrs, according to his directions, was the discovery, in 1864, beneath the High Altar, of two cavities of unequal size, the larger in the middle, the smaller on its left hand, evidently burial-places. There were no bodies in them, but the remains of the three saints were found in a sepulchre of porphyry above the cavities. It was known that they had been removed and laid in one tomb together by Archbishop Angilberto in the ninth century, probably at the time when the floor of the sanctuary was raised and the golden altar set up. The church appears to have been completely rebuilt at this time by Angilberto (824-859) and Ansperto (868-881), after the instalment of the Benedictines, in order to suit it to the requirements of monastic ritual. Angilberto had the main part built, it is supposed, and Ansperto added the atrium—_Atria vicinas struxit et ante fores_,—as is recorded in the lengthy epitaph of the said prelate inscribed above his tomb on the south side of the nave.