Oratorio di San Protaso, Religious oratory in Lorenteggio district, Milan, Italy

The Oratorio di San Protaso is a small Lombard Romanesque oratory in the median strip of via Lorenteggio, with a rectangular plan and a hut-shaped facade. A wooden door with an architrave and a round window above it form the entrance, and three ogival slots in the side walls light the interior, which has a wooden coffered ceiling.

The oratory was built around the year 1000 outside Milan's walls, in the suburb of Lorenteggio, as a place of worship for local peasants. It depended on the Basilica di San Vittore al Corpo, which supplied its priest. A Milanese legend holds that Frederick Barbarossa prayed here after the siege of 1161–62 and spared the building. In the 1950s residents' protests saved it from demolition for the widening of via Lorenteggio.

Locals call it Gesetta di Lusert, the Little Church of the Lizards, a name from the 1950s when the abandoned building was home to many lizards. Songwriter Piero Mazzarella wrote a song about it, and painters depicted it when it still stood among open fields.

This oratory opens to visitors during the Festa del Lorenteggio neighborhood festival held on the first Sunday of May and the last Sunday of November. Plan your visit around these dates if you want to see inside the building.

Today this structure sits in the median strip of a busy road, preserved through community protests against demolition in the 1950s. Its unusual location today reflects how determined residents were to save this building.