Palazzo Milzetti is a historic building in Faenza, the seat of the National Museum of the Neoclassical Age in Romagna. It became a house museum because of the exceptional state of preservation of its Neoclassical decorative scheme, made between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth and representative of the aristocratic culture of a family of the full Napoleonic period.
What to see
In 1792 Count Nicola Milzetti commissioned the architect Giuseppe Pistocchi to build a palace by unifying the old family houses, damaged by the strong earthquake of 1781; Pistocchi handled the façade, adorned with a Mannerist rustication framing the windows, and the main structures. His son, Count Francesco Milzetti, a Napoleonic Knight of the Iron Crown, in 1799 commissioned the architect Giovanni Antonio Antolini to resume the works, who designed the completion of the staircase and the large octagonal salon on the piano nobile, the «Temple of Apollo». From 1802 to 1805 Felice Giani and his workshop, led by Gaetano Bertolani, decorated the interiors, with stuccoes by the plasterers Francesco and Giovan Battista Ballanti Graziani and Antonio Trentanove: a grand undertaking in which paintings and stuccoes, with refined mythological and historical references, point to the function of each room and make every hall a self-contained unit, wholly centred on the unity of the arts. The ornaments, in tempera on the wall and based on learned reworkings of ancient and Renaissance grotesques, have kept their original brilliance intact.
Already in 1808 Francesco Milzetti had to sell the residence because of serious financial troubles. To the Rondinini counts is due the completion, between 1830 and 1851, of the west wing, the furnishings and the vast garden with the «rustic hut» decorated in trompe l'œil by Romolo Liverani. Sold to the State on 26 June 1973, the palace was opened to the public in 1979 and since 2001 has housed the museum. The route runs across the ground floor and the piano nobile: among the rooms, the Bathroom Vestibule, elliptical and dominated by black, decorated «in the manner of the Baths of Titus», with a dome showing the Wedding of Neptune and Amphitrite; the small bathroom, with a tub sunk into the floor that originally had hot and cold water, a very modern solution for its time; the Reception Room, with a ceiling «in the manner of Hadrian's Villa»; on the piano nobile the Ballroom, or Gallery of Achilles, the Hall of Numa Pompilius, the Hall of Ulysses and the Cabinet of Love.
Visiting
The palace is in Faenza and the museum is a state museum. The sources consulted give no opening hours or visiting arrangements: check them.
Our editors' tip
Antonio Paolucci wrote, for an exhibition of 2009 at Palazzo Milzetti, that one will find, neither in Vienna nor in Saint Petersburg nor in Paris, a building comparable in refinement, elegance and taste for interior decoration to the one that Pistocchi built and Giani frescoed for Count Francesco Milzetti.
