The Poldi Pezzoli palace. Notes on the building’s “historical genealogy”

Abstract

A museum among the most frequented not only by scholars of collecting, but also by aristocratic and upper-middle-class travelers of the nineteenth century and by tourists from the early twentieth century onward, the Poldi Pezzoli Pal­ace in Milan has, over its one hundred and seventy years of existence, been the subject of in-depth studies on the history of the nineteenth-century building and its collections. Less well known, however, are the identity of the founder of the original seventeenth-century palace, the phases of ownership transfers and re­furbishments in the eighteenth century, and the circumstances under which it came into the hands of the creator of the exhibition project in the nineteenth century, as well as the distant roots of the traditions – absorbed by him through the maternal line - of centuries of collecting passion, documented since the fif­teenth century. These aspects are retraced here on the basis of texts and sources.