A near-perfect snapshot of the historicist taste of late nineteenth-century Milan, the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum occupies the family palace in the fashion quarter around Via Montenapoleone. The mansion was the home of the brothers Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi, two aristocratic collectors who from the 1880s remade their family residence as a fantasy of a sixteenth-century Lombard nobleman home, filling it with paintings, weapons, tapestries and furniture from the Italian Renaissance. The brothers approach was unusual. Rather than collecting in the abstract for a gallery, they bought each piece with a specific room in mind, designing settings in which Renaissance objects would coexist with discreet nineteenth-century conveniences. Hot water, electric lighting, central heating and indoor plumbing were quietly built into a house dressed up as if for the court of Ludovico il Moro. The collection is dominated by Italian Renaissance decorative arts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including maiolica, leatherwork, ivories and stuccoes, alongside European Renaissance arms and armour. Paintings include a Madonna and Child lunette by a follower of Donatello and works by, among others, Giovanni Bellini, Giampietrino, Bergognone and Cesare da Sesto. After the death of the brothers, the house remained in the family until the 1974 establishment of the Bagatti Valsecchi Foundation, to which the collections were donated, and the museum opened to the public twenty years later, on 22 November 1994. It is recognised as one of the best preserved historic house museums in Europe. The rooms are presented as the brothers intended, with no later additions, and informative cards in several languages let visitors trace the iconography of the paintings, the symbolism of the carved ceilings and the everyday Renaissance objects on the shelves and tables. Quietly tucked into a side street within the busy Quadrilatero della Moda, the museum draws a steady but rarely overwhelming flow of visitors, offering a calm counterpoint to the high-street fashion of the neighbourhood and an unusually intact window onto the Renaissance imagination of late nineteenth-century Milan.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: Via Gesu 5, Milan, Italy

Website: https://museobagattivalsecchi.org

Opening Date: 22/11/1994