The Bagatti Valsecchi brothers, Fausto and Giuseppe, built themselves a Renaissance palace in the 1880s, three centuries after the style they loved had gone out of fashion, and furnished it so convincingly with genuine 15th and 16th-century pieces that visitors still ask whether it is a real historic house.
It opened as a museum in 1994, its rooms named for their function in noble Milanese life: the Sala dei Falconi, the Camera Rossa, an armory hung with weapons the brothers actually collected and wore to costume balls. A small Madonna attributed to the Bellini workshop hangs among cassoni, majolica and stained glass gathered from across Italy. The palazzo sits two streets from the designer boutiques of Montenapoleone, itself a kind of costume, private wealth staged as public spectacle a century before the neighborhood’s current one.
