Bagatti Valsecchi Museum

This guide to the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum in Milan tells how brothers Fausto and Giuseppe, both trained as lawyers, spent the 1880s building a private palace on Via Gesù designed to pass as an authentic fifteenth-century Milanese home. It follows their hunt for genuine Renaissance paintings, armor and carved ceilings, and the modern comforts they wired in behind the illusion. Giuseppe married into the powerful Borromeo family in 1882 and raised five children in the rooms you are walking through.