On the Neuhauserstrasse, at number 6, you will find the Michaelskirche, built from 1583 by order of William V, whose mania of grandeur drove the State to the edge of bankruptcy. The Sovereign could, at any rate, boast to have instigated the building of the second biggest barrel vaulted roof in the world, smaller only than the one of Saint Peter’s, in Rome. In shouldn’t surprise, then, that, during the late Renaissance, the Michaelskirche was the most important religious complex north of the Alps. A symbol of Catholic power in Germany, it was the pivot of the counterreformation and of the re-catholicisation of the German speaking world. The façade, on three levels and having a double entrance, is enriched by two portals that lead to the interior. This, based on a single nave layout, was designed on the model of Rome’s Chiesa del Gesù, the Jesuits’ order mother church. On the left of the altar there is the funerary monument of Eugène de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy, who, after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, retired to live in Bavaria. On the right there is the entrance to the Royal Crypt where Louis II is buried. In a side chapel are preserved, inside a gold casket, the skulls of the healer Saints Cosmas and Damian. The crypt, located under the choir, is one of three monastic crypts where, to this day, the members of the ducal Wittelsbach family are buried, William V, Maximilian I and Louis II of Bavaria among them.