Casa Museo Lodovico Pogliaghi, Art museum at Sacro Monte, Varese, Italy.
Casa Museo Lodovico Pogliaghi is an art museum on the Sacro Monte in Varese housing over 1500 artworks including paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts displayed in restored rooms. The house also contains approximately 580 archaeological objects collected over many decades, spanning Egyptian, Etruscan, and Greco-Roman periods.
Lodovico Pogliaghi was born in Milan in 1857 and purchased land on the Sacro Monte in 1885 to build this villa. He spent his entire life expanding and refining the house and its collections until his death in 1950.
The house displays Egyptian, Etruscan, and Greco-Roman objects alongside Renaissance and Baroque artworks, revealing the broad collecting interests of its former owner. European and Asian textiles from different periods are also arranged throughout the rooms, showing how these pieces were valued and lived with.
The museum sits at the end of the viale delle Cappelle, the tree-lined avenue of chapels on the Sacro Monte, so it is reached on foot along that route. Part of the collection, in rooms restored and rearranged in 2005, is shown in the Rustico building on request. The museum reopened in May 2014 with a layout modelled on the 1950s arrangement.
The villa holds the original plaster casts of the main door of Milan Cathedral, recovered after the lost-wax bronze casting and reassembled and reworked by Pogliaghi himself. They sit among his sketches, drawings and working materials, which the house preserves alongside his art collection.
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