From home to museum
The Bagatti Valsecchi Museum is a house museum that is the result of an extraordinary collecting venture in the late 19th century, involving two brothers: Barons Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi. Starting in the 1880s, the two brothers devoted themselves to renovating the family home located in the heart of Milan: a building between Via Gesù and Via Santo Spirito.
At the same time, the two brothers began collecting 15th- and 16th-century paintings and applied art artefacts with the intention of displaying them in their home to create a residence inspired by 16th-century Lombard dwellings.
It was an incredibly modern project, not least because of the brothers’ desire to concentrate everything that was futuristic in the world at that time – heating, running water and electric light – in their home and combine it with the utmost refinement.
After the death of Fausto and Giuseppe, the Bagatti Valsecchi house continued to be inhabited by their heirs until 1974, when the Bagatti Valsecchi Foundation was established and given the collection of artworks assembled by the two brothers. Twenty years later, in 1994, the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum opened to the public, one of the best-preserved house museums in Europe and one of the first great expressions of Milanese design.
