In 1469 Borso d'Este had this palace built for an exile: Diotisalvi Neroni, the Florentine banished after conspiring against the Medici. In fifteenth-century Italy, housing your neighbour's enemies was a political act, and the house you offered them measured how much they counted. It was a single-storey building with a tower rising above it.
What to see
In the sixteenth century it came back to the Este, who transformed it: one of them had the inner courtyard made, attributed to Girolamo da Carpi, and another used it as a link between the little palace of Marfisa d'Este and palazzo Schifanoia, so as to pass from one residence to the other without going out into the street.
After Marfisa's death the palace passed by inheritance and was sold in 1643 to count Borso Bonacossi, whose family held it for two and a half centuries, remaking the front and the rooms around the tower. A recent restoration uncovered, beneath the baroque ceilings of four rooms, the old coffered wooden ceilings painted in tempera with geometric motifs.
Visiting
The palace is in via Cisterna del Follo, in the quarter of the Este residences, five minutes from Schifanoia; it is publicly owned and opens mainly for exhibitions and events, so access depends on the calendar. Three quarters of an hour.
Our editors' tip
If you find yourself in one of the restored rooms, look at the ceiling and consider that there is another one above or below it. Here the sixteenth-century coffers were hidden by baroque decoration, and for two centuries nobody knew they were there. Old houses keep their earlier versions inside them, and every so often somebody finds them.