Agilded cloud rose through the dark of Milan’s cathedral again on the 14th of September, forty meters up into the apse, carrying the archbishop toward a niche most visitors never notice is there. It happens twice each September, and has happened, in one form or another, for nearly four hundred and fifty years: the Nivola, literally “cloud” in old Milanese, is both the name of the object and the name of the whole ritual built around it, and its recent ascent closed this year’s edition by returning the single most venerated object the Archdiocese of Milan owns to its hiding place.
That object is the Santo Chiodo, the Holy Nail, one of the nails tradition says was used at the Crucifixion. Local devotion also calls it the Santo Morso, the Holy Bit, because of its shape: roughly thirty centimeters long and bent into something close to a horse’s bridle piece.
