A place that every lover of beauty and interior designer in the world should visit, to be inspired by contaminations between cultures, styles and craftmanship that have given life to extraordinary decorations and furnishing solutions, where hours and hours of manual work have been dedicated to every smallest detail with the intent of aspiring to the divine.

The Casa Museo Lodovico Pogliaghi is, in fact, the almost unique example of a residence designed and furnished in the smallest details by one of the greatest decorators in the world, which has reached us practically intact thanks to the legacy, when the artist was still alive, to the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana which has become its custodian.

Fundamenta mea in monctibus sanctis.

(phrase that welcomes guests to Casa Pogliaghi)

Lodovico Pogliaghi was born in Milan in 1857, he enrolled at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a student of Giuseppe Bertini, and from an early age he demonstrated incredible taste, ability for fast manual execution and familiarity with all the arts: sculpture first and foremost, but also painting, graphics, goldsmith art and glass art.

After having distinguished himself as an illustrator, he was entrusted with the chair of ornamentation at Brera and began to be commissioned important works, such as the decoration of Giuseppe Verdi’s crypt in Milan, the door of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome and, his most famous work, the enormous door of the Milan Cathedral. Under the direction of Giuseppe Bertini, he collaborated on the setting up of the Poldi Pezzoli Museum and of Palazzo Turati in Milan.

Alongside his artistic production, he began a remarkable private collection. His passion for art, antiquities and unusual, exotic and rare objects from which he took inspiration for his works, led him to want to create a home that could contain them all.

While Pogliaghi worked on the restoration of various chapels and the sanctuary of the Sacro Monte di Varese, he fell in love with it so much that, starting in 1885, he purchased a series of lands to undertake the construction of his home right there, dedicating himself with great dedication to the project throughout his life.

Donated to the Holy See in 1937, the House Museum is today a truly extraordinary place where, as you wander from room to room, you feel the same sense of dizziness that you feel in Canova’s temple in Possagno or Palazzo Grimani in Venice. We are faced with the creation of a man who saw no creative boundaries, a visionary who deserves to be “rediscovered” and taken on as a genius even by new generations.

Starting from the Red Room, which takes its name from the eighteenth-century crimson damasks used as upholstery and is characterized by a large Ming vase that stands on a neo-rococo bronze support made by Pogliaghi himself, you can glimpse the most famous room in the house: the Exedra.

Designed by Pogliaghi and inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, the room houses the marble statue of Dionysus-Apollo, dating back to the first half of the 2nd century AD, purchased in Rome in 1893, and surrounded by works of Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Etruscan-Italic art that are impossible to remain indifferent to.

From there, you enter his Atelier where the 1:1 scale plaster cast of the central door of the Milan Cathedral dedicated to the Virgin Mary is kept. The panels, after having undergone the lost-wax casting process from which the final bronze work was born, were assembled, reworked and partly painted by the artist to obtain a personal reproduction of the work.

Next, another marvel: the Golden Gallery where you can admire the 1:4 scale reproduction in plaster, gilded stucco and mirrors of the sumptuous ceiling created by Pogliaghi for the bathroom of a palace of the third-to-last Shah of Persia. The sovereign had rewarded the artist by giving him some alabaster slabs that Pogliaghi used to create an original window that filters a warm and diffused light capable of giving this room an enchanted atmosphere.

At the ends of the Gallery stand out two of the most precious and unusual objects in the collection: two Egyptian sarcophagi. The oldest and best preserved, dating back to the XXV dynasty (747-656 BC), housed the mummy of Tameramun, identified as a singer in the temple of the god Amun in Karnak. The male sarcophagus, made during the following dynasty (664-525 BC), was instead stripped of its original polychromy, leaving the sycamore wood exposed.

These described are only a small part of the wonders kept in the House Museum of Lodovico Pogliaghi, which is certainly one of the most extraordinary places in the world.

The Secret

Around 1948, the famous ceramic industry Richard Ginori commissioned Pogliaghi a series of vases for the Doccia Museum in Sesto Fiorentino, the artist was already 91 years old and would pass away two years later in 1950.

Useful Info

Casa Museo Pogliaghi
Ingresso dal Viale delle Cappelle
21100 Località Santa Maria del Monte, Varese
Tel. +39 328 8377206

Entrance: 7 euro on weekdays, 10 euro on festive days