Hello Milano guide to Milan - Museums Boschi Stef Milan

Casa Museo Boschi-Di Stefano

Via Jan 15 (2nd floor) • MM1 Lima.

Admission free. Wed-Sun 14.00-18.00. Info: 02.2024.0568.

Marieda Di Stefano married Antonio Boschi in 1927, and the couple began collecting temporary art. When Boschi died in 1987, he left over 2,000 works to the Municipality, with the condition that his home should become a museum. This small apartment presents the best of their collection (Sironi, De Chirico, Savinio, Fontana, Carrà, Arturo Martini, Campigli, Tosi, De Pisis, Dova, Morlotti, Chighine, Piero Manzoni, Casorati, Marussig…). The building itself is a fine piece of 1930s architecture by Portaluppi. The pictures are not always easy to appreciate – they cover virtually all the available wallspace, and the lighting is often inadequate – but overall the museum provides an evocative impression of the sort of Milan home in which the artists of the day gathered for evenings of music and conversation in the company of Antonio, Marieda, and their cats which appear in two of the paintings. More information

Boschi-Di Stefano Museum: Home is where the art is

Museums such as the Uffizi in Florence, the Vatican museums in Rome or Brera in Milan are justly famous as collections that encompass a broad span of Italian art, but trying to take them in can be quite a daunting task. Smaller, less familiar museums can offer more concentrated experiences. One example in Milan is the Church of San Maurizio, Corso Magenta 15, (see page 18), in which the lovely 16th century frescoes whisk you back into the colourful world of the Renaissance.

A small museum that opened recently in the Porta Venezia district offers a very personal introduction to 20th century Italian art. From the outside, the Casa Museo Boschi-Di Stefano looks just like an ordinary home. For years, that is exactly what it was for Marieda Di Stefano and Antonio Boschi. Marieda inherited a group of paintings from her father, and soon Antonio, an engineer, shared her passion for collecting contemporary art. They started purchasing work by the avant-garde painters of their day, who began to congregate in the Boschi-Di Stefano household. Painters would relax and chat in rooms whose walls were entirely covered by paintings, while Antonio played the violin accompanied by whoever was capable of playing the piano.

Antonio and Marieda saved money whenever they could in order to buy art. They travelled incessantly in the search for new paintings, but always third class. Antonio even sold his car in 1929 to buy four pictures. On another occasion, Antonio saw an attractive fur in Paris, and on his return to Milan, gave Marieda the money and sent her to Paris to try it on and buy it. She went, dropped in at an art gallery, saw a painting by De Chirico, and bought that instead of the fur. She took the canvas back to Milan rolled up, hidden under the mattress of her bunk in the train. During the war and the German occupation, the couple moved the entire collection to their house in the country. There they hid the carefully-wrapped art works behind a false wall in the cellar, the fresh plasterwork obscured by cheeses stacked up against it, while scores of salamis dangled down from the ceiling.

After the war, the couple resumed their role as patrons of the arts and followed the art scene as one style gave way to the next. By 1973, the collection amounted to over 2,000 paintings, and Antonio – now a widower since Marieda had died in 1968, and the couple had no children – decided to donate them all to the Municipality of Milan on the condition that their seven apartments in Via Jan should become a museum. Important precedents already existed. The Poldi Pezzoli museum in Via Manzoni was created in the 19th century by collector Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, and the Bagatti Valsecchi museum in Via Gesù was the result of of two brothers and their idea of recreating the atmosphere of a Renaissance home.

Antonio died in 1987, and the collection was legally accepted by Milan Municipality in 1988. Since Boschi had worked professionally in the public sector – one of his inventions was a special joint still used today in the smooth-braking system on the rubber-tyred Paris Metro trains – he was aware of the delays that often occur, and put a time-limit on the operation. If Milan Municipality hadn't opened the museum by 1995, the pictures would go to the Municipality of Novara.

What exactly happened at the Comune di Milano offices over the next decade is rather a mystery. Instead of being restored and converted into the new museum, several of the apartments were rented out for residential use. The paintings were transferred to the cellars of Palazzo Reale. 1995 was drawing ever nearer and virtually nothing had been done. Luckily, local governments come and go even more rapidly than art movements. A new councillor in charge of cultural affairs managed to keep the collection in Milan, and initiated the restoration of the space.

So, considering that the Museum nearly ended up emigrating to another city, the opening of the Casa Museo Boschi-Di Stefano can be considered as a success, albeit a decade late.

Like the church of San Maurizio, the museum plunges you into a different world, this time that of 1930s Milan. The house itself was designed in 1929 by architect Piero Portaluppi, who crafted the balconies and French windows into an unusual motif. The second-floor apartment contains 200 paintings, covering much of the available wall space, just as they did in the private household. The furniture includes some superb pieces made in the same decade, including a dining table by Gio Ponti, and some lovely lamps in Murano glass.

The paintings trace the history of 20th century Italian art, from Futurism (about 1910) right through to Lucio Fontana's blank canvases slashed with a razor blade, and the Conceptual art of the 1960s, such as Piero Manzoni's "Impronta d'artista", an egg marked with the artist's fingerprint. Many of the paintings are in the style that dominated Italian art from 1920 to 1940, namely Novecento. The artists in this current were convinced of a need for a modernist reinterpretation of the Italian art tradition, in contrast to the intellectual complexity of Cubism. Mario Sironi, for example, painted landscapes, concentrating on scenes from Milan's industrial districts.

The recent wave of interest in the Novecento is demonstrated by a show at Spazio Oberdan, which is, very conveniently, just ten minutes walk from the Boschi-Di Stefano museum. Here, the excellent lighting and the space available for the works – there are about a hundred, in a large area – make it easier to appreciate the paintings.

But the atmosphere of the Casa-Museo is well worth experiencing. In the hallway, the two portraits of the couple holding their beloved cats set the scene. According to architect Alessandro Mendini, Marieda's sister's son, the felines "were the real rulers of the house… they were even allowed to scratch the paintings and sharpen their claws on the carpets!" The sitting room evokes the age-old desire for a unity between the arts and life. The room is dominated by De Chirico's enormous School of Gladiators, which is none the worse for wear after its long train journey (and the few years in the cellar with the salamis), and the Bechstein grand piano used for family concerts, bathed by the light pouring in through Portaluppi's lovely balcony windows.