Villa Necchi Campiglio

Behind a wall in Milan's Porta Venezia quarter waits a complete 1930s world. Villa Necchi Campiglio, built between 1932 and 1935 by Piero Portaluppi for a wealthy Pavia family, preserves its tailored interiors, walled garden and private swimming pool exactly as high-society Milan lived them.

Why it matters

The villa is the definitive portrait of interwar Milanese sophistication: a house designed down to the last hinge by a single architect. Portaluppi equipped it with solutions that were startling in 1935: a detached porter's lodge, a service tunnel, an internal lift, advanced window systems and bespoke furniture of his own design, plus that almost unheard-of amenity, a private swimming pool. The family bequeathed the house to FAI — Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano — in 2001, and FAI layered it with major art collections, including works by Mario Sironi and Arturo Martini in the monumental hall and drawings by Modigliani, Picasso and Fontana upstairs. The result is a double attraction: a perfectly preserved modernist interior and a serious art museum in one address. Its screen career in Io sono l'amore has made its geometric facades and chequered ceilings recognisable far beyond Milan.

What to notice

Enter through the garden wall and let the sequence of spaces do the talking. The monumental hall sets the tone, holding Sironi's painting La famiglia del pastore and Martini's sculpture L'Amante morta from the Gian Ferrari collection. On the ground floor, study Portaluppi's signature details: the lozenge-patterned ceilings, the veranda with its integrated greenhouse, the library, smoking room and dining room furnished to his drawings, all executed in luxurious materials — ceppo stone, marble, parchment, burl wood. In 1938 Tomaso Buzzi reworked some rooms, "antiquing" them with neoclassical elements, tapestries and aristocratic furniture, so the house lets you compare two strains of Milanese taste at once. Upstairs, the bedrooms and marble-lined bathrooms host the De' Micheli collection of eighteenth-century Venetian works and the Sforni collection of master drawings. The original garage now houses an immersive video installation dedicated to the environment; the attic rooms display the Piero Portaluppi archive of furniture and drawings.

Context and history

Portaluppi built the villa between 1932 and 1935 for the Necchi-Campiglio family, industrialists from Pavia who had settled into Milan's most elegant residential quarter. The house distilled his mature style, a refined synthesis of tradition and modernity, and its technology — lift, tunnel, pool, custom joinery — was avant-garde for its day. After Gigina Necchi Campiglio and Nedda Necchi gave the property to FAI in 2001, the foundation opened it as a house museum and enriched it through successive donations: the Alighiero and Emilietta de' Micheli collection in 1995, the Claudia Gian Ferrari collection in 2009, and the Guido Sforni collection, spanning 1935 to 1975, in 2017. The Piero Portaluppi archive is presented in a permanent three-room display in the villa's attic. The villa also anchors Milan's Casemuseo network with the Poldi Pezzoli, Bagatti Valsecchi and Boschi Di Stefano houses.