The story
In one of the bathrooms of this Milan palazzo, the shower is hidden inside a white marble niche carved to look like a Renaissance fountain, and it runs hot and cold. That small disguise explains the whole house. In the late 19th century two brothers, the barons Fausto and Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi, rebuilt their family home on Via Gesù, in the streets now known for fashion boutiques, as though it were a nobleman's house of the 1500s. They hunted across Italy for genuine 15th- and 16th-century furniture, tapestries, armour, maiolica and paintings, and where no original could be found they had craftsmen copy period models, down to radiators tucked inside carved wooden benches.
The finest painting is Saint Justina by Giovanni Bellini, the Venetian master, a full-length figure of the young martyr painted in the 1470s. Nearby hang a Saint John the Baptist by Bernardino Zenale and a Madonna enthroned with saints by Giampietrino, a Milanese follower of Leonardo.
The family kept the rooms almost untouched. A foundation was set up in the 1970s to keep the collection and the apartments together, and the house opened to the public in 1994, with the furniture still standing where the brothers placed it.
