Bagatti Valsecchi Museum

Bagatti Valsecchi Museum tickets: the Case Museo Card

The Bagatti Valsecchi Museum shows how two brothers wanted to live in the 1880s: among furniture and art from the 16th century, with central heating, running water and electric light fitted while the palace was going up.

Our site has no ticket for this house alone: it comes with the Case Museo Card. For €25, or less for students up to 26, it gives you one entry to each of Milan’s four house museums: this one, the Poldi Pezzoli Museum on nearby Via Manzoni, Villa Necchi Campiglio and the Boschi Di Stefano flat.

You don’t have to fit them into one day. The card stays valid for a year after you buy it, and it’s personal, so everyone in your group needs their own.

Inside the Bagatti Valsecchi house, from the armoury to the Red Room

Don’t come expecting a picture gallery with one famous painting at the end. You’re here for the whole house: inlaid furniture, ivories, gilded wrought iron, majolica, glass, textiles and 16th-century parade armour, set out room by room as the brothers wanted to live with them.

Two of the paintings are by the Bellini brothers, the Venetian Renaissance painters. Giovanni Bellini painted the Santa Giustina de’ Borromeis around 1470–75, and Gentile his portrait of Lorenzo Giustiniani around 1470, still in its original frame. There’s work too by Giampietrino, a painter in Leonardo’s circle in Milan.

Some rooms were copied, or carried in whole. One reproduces a room of the ducal palace in Mantua, another borrows its ideas from the palace at Urbino, and the Sala della Stufa Valtellinese was brought from a palace in Sondrio, in the Alps north of Milan.

The bedrooms are where the house feels most lived in. In the Red Room the four-poster is hung in red damask, with a wrought-iron bedhead and carved chests around it.

For children, the desk sells a Silent Book for €3, a picture book that sends them hunting for details in the rooms. For a guide, download the museum’s free app, Museo Ba·Va, which plays the audio for whichever room you’re standing in. Its Wunderkammer route uses augmented reality to bring up drawings and photographs from the house’s archive.

Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi, two barons who never practised law

The brothers spent the 1880s and early 1890s building a palace in the style of the Renaissance and furnishing it with pieces from the period.

Their family stayed on after them. In 1974 Pasino, Giuseppe’s son, gave the collection to a new foundation, and the Lombardy Region took on the palace and restored it. When it opened as a museum in 1994, the rooms were still arranged as the brothers had left them.

The Bagatti Valsecchi on the YesMilano and The Milan Pass

If you’d rather have a city pass that also covers transport and the Duomo, three of them include this house.

Watch the calendar with a three-day YesMilano: if it starts on a Sunday, Monday and Tuesday fall on the house’s closing days. The passes are compared in Milan Pass and Milan’s city passes.

Via Gesù 5, between Montenapoleone and San Babila

The museum is at Via Gesù 5, in the Quadrilatero della Moda, the block of fashion streets around Via Montenapoleone. The metro stop is Montenapoleone, on the yellow M3, where tram 1 also stops; San Babila, on the M1 and M4, works too, with buses 54 and 61. The 94 bus stops at Piazza Cavour.