Museo Poldi Pezzoli

The face on the museum's own emblem is a young woman in strict profile, painted around 1470 by Piero del Pollaiuolo: pale skin, elaborate braids, a Milanese noblewoman fixed forever looking to the right. She hangs in what was once a private apartment near La Scala, the home of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, a wealthy Milanese collector who spent his life filling these rooms with Renaissance paintings, armour, glass, clocks and textiles.

He arranged each room around a period and a mood, and left the whole thing to the public. It opened in 1881, two years after his death, as one of the first house-museums in Italy. Alongside the Pollaiuolo profile you meet a Botticelli Madonna, a Mantegna, and Piero della Francesca's small Saint Nicholas, all in the domestic setting he designed for them rather than on white gallery walls. A room of medieval and Renaissance arms and armour survives from his first passion as a collector.