History

The site has a Benedictine identity older than the university by nearly a thousand years. The Monastero di Sant'Ambrogio grew alongside the basilica founded by the bishop Ambrose in the late fourth century, and by the end of the fifteenth century the monastic community commissioned a new architectural campaign for its cloisters. Tradition, repeated in the standard literature on Milanese Renaissance architecture, attributes the project to Donato Bramante, who was then working in Milan under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza. The cloisters that visitors cross today belong to that campaign in their plan and proportions, even where later restoration has replaced individual elements.

The conversion to a university campus began on 7 December 1921, when Father Agostino Gemelli, a Franciscan friar, physician and psychologist, inaugurated the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. The institution moved into the ex-monastery in the late 1920s, and in 1929 Gemelli entrusted the architectural restructuring to Giovanni Muzio, working with the engineer Pier Fausto Barelli. Muzio's intervention extended over roughly twenty years. Among the dated phases are the Collegio Augustinianum (1933–1934), the Collegio Marianum (1938), the conversion of the monastic refectory into the Aula Magna, and the campus mensa completed in 1949.

The Second World War interrupted that programme. On the night of 15–16 August 1943, Allied bombing struck the complex, destroying several classrooms and damaging one of the cloisters traditionally associated with Bramante. The post-war reconstruction reintegrated the Renaissance fabric and completed the Muzio campus on terms that are still visible to anyone walking in from Largo Gemelli today.