Bono of Milan

Saint Bono (Bon, Buono) of Milan was archbishop of Milan from 818 to 822. He is venerated as a saint in the Roman Catholic Church; our sources mention no Orthodox veneration and give no date of commemoration. His origin is not well established. Milanese tradition calls him a member of the noble Castiglioni family. This information was first set down in writing by the fourteenth-⁠century Italian historian Goffredo da Bussero. The view was held to be true until the nineteenth century, when historians began to doubt seriously the reports of the medieval chronicles about the kinship of the archbishops of Milan with noble local families. Today this information, which finds no confirmation in the sources of the early Middle Ages, is considered unfounded.

Bono ascended the throne of the archdiocese of Milan in the year 818. He became here the successor of Archbishop Anselm I, deposed for taking part in the revolt of the king of Italy, Bernard. Bono's governance fell in a period of great decline in the influence of the see of Milan, which followed the removal of Anselm. This led to an almost complete absence, in the historical sources of Bono's time, of information on church life in Milan at that time. The only report of the chronicles on the activity of this archbishop is the testimony of the extraordinary care he showed for his flock, heavily afflicted by the flood that struck the Po plain in 820. The Greek source speaks of his generosity to the inhabitants of Milan during the floods.

In 818 he gave the relics of Saint Aurelius to Notingus, bishop of Vercelli, who placed them in his church and later took them to Germany, his country of origin, to the abbey of Hirsau. The medieval catalogues of the archdiocese of Milan place Bono's death on 23 January 822 and say that he was buried in the basilica of Saint Ambrose. His successor on the throne was Archbishop Angilbert I.