The Sant'Eustorgio monumental complex is one of the most important and prestigious in Milan: it comprises the entire basilica block and the old Dominican convent, all of which, over the centuries, have developed into a highly significant area for Milanese Christian history.
Piazza Sant'Eustorgio retains the legendary fountain where St Barnabas is said to have baptized the first Milanese, in about the mid-first century AD, thus founding the local church. The basilica is known above all for its worship of the Magi, and precisely Bishop Eustorgius is said to have brought part of their remains here from the Orient. The basilica is also linked to the worship of St Pietro Martyr, a Veronese Dominican who lived in the convent in about the mid-1200s. A committed anti-Catharist preacher and ferocious inquisitor, the monk was killed in 1252 by a heretic, in the Barlassina woods, near Milan. Consequently, Sant'Eustorgio is a place of history and of prayer, that has clearly symbolized the identity of Ambrosian Christianity since it was founded as a place of worship.
The complex stands on what is now called Corso di Porta Ticinese, once an important road leading to Pavia, the ancient capital of the Longobards. Sant'Eustorgio is still a departure point for the procession leading to the Duomo, when a new archbishop of Milan is installed. The basilica was founded in the Early Christian period and rebuilt in Romanesque style between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, then remodelled in the first half of the thirteenth century, after the Dominicans moved here. This was when the convent annex was begun, englobing the existing hospital. From 1228 Sant'Eustorgio was the seat of the Lombard Inquisition, protected by the Visconti family from the mid-1200s to the fifteenth century, a golden age for the convent that lasted until the mid-1400s, when the foundation of a second Dominican unit in the city, at Santa Maria delle Grazie, undermined the dominant role the former had played in Milanese society up to that time.