Museum of Lodovico Pogliaghi

The Casa Museo Lodovico Pogliaghi is a museum located at the end of the Viale delle Cappelle del Sacro Monte in Varese. Working on the restoration of the chapels of the Sacro Monte di Varese, Lodovico Pogliaghi (Milan 1857 - Varese 1950) was enchanted by the tranquility and beauty of these places. From 1885 he decided to buy several adjoining lands on which he began to build the villa which he worked daily and busily until his death. He conceived the house as a laboratory-museum dedicated to the retreat, study and exhibition of the fruit of his passion for collecting. The building, designed by Pogliaghi himself, reflects the ecclectic taste of the time and the owner’s interest in all forms of art. Lodovico Pogliaghi’s collection includes precious Egyptian, Etruscan and Greek-Roman archaeological finds, paintings and sculptures dating from the Renaissance and the Baroque era, a rich collection of ancient European and Asian fabrics, precious historical furnishings, curiosities and bizarre objects from all over the world. Next to its collection, the villa preserves sketches, chalks, drawings and working materials by Pogliaghi. Painter, sculptor, architect and scenographer, he also applied himself with great finesse and elegance to graphics, glyptic, goldsmith and glass art, working for important clients. His best known work is certainly the main door of the Duomo di Milano, whose original plaster is kept in the house museum. Part of the collection, displayed with a museum display, is visible in the rooms, restored and set up again in 2005, of the Rustico della Casa Museo Lodovico Pogliaghi. In total the house museum houses more than 1500 works including paintings, sculptures and applied arts and about 580 archaeological objects. The villa, now owned by the Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, has been open as a museum since 1974 and until the 1990s and reopened to the public in May