Palazzo Belgiojoso (Musei civici)

Palazzo Belgiojoso is Lecco's museum palace: an eighteenth-century residence where the city keeps its archaeology, its history and its natural history under one roof, with a planetarium in the renovated wing. Four collections trace the territory from Neanderthal traces to the Resistance, with the Lariosaurus fossil as the star exhibit.

Why it matters

This is the civic memory of Lecco gathered in a single historic building. The palace has housed the city's museums since 1927, and today it combines a provincial archaeological collection spanning the Paleolithic to the early Middle Ages, a historical museum founded in 1934, a natural history museum preserved largely as a document of nineteenth-century science, and a modern planetarium opened in 2004. The U-shaped Baroque palace opening onto a garden forms part of the museums' historical setting.

What to notice

The ground-floor portico carries plaques and coats of arms salvaged from the seventeenth-century Spanish fortress of Forte di Fuentes; four medallions on the grand staircase depict characters from Manzoni's novels, while the piano nobile preserves eighteenth-century decoration. The archaeological collection includes Neanderthal traces from Rovagnate, Bronze Age stilt-house pottery from Lake Pusiano, Golasecca material and an inscribed menhir from Ello. The historical museum presents the Risorgimento, Lecco's industrial growth and the Resistance. Natural-history collections of birds, mammals, insects and minerals retain a nineteenth-century display style, with the Lariosaurus fossil among their highlights. The planetarium's eight-metre dome hosts programmes developed with the astronomy group DEEP SPACE Lecco.

Context and history

The palace was probably begun in the early eighteenth century by the Locatelli family, who came from the Valle Imagna near Bergamo, and took its present form around 1773 when they united neighbouring buildings. In 1794 it passed to Giovanna Mellerio, wife of Rinaldo Alberico Barbiano di Belgiojoso d'Este, who had the gardens remodelled with architect Leopoldo Pollack; the name Belgiojoso dates from this ownership. Confiscated in 1797 by the Cisalpine Republic to seat the Dipartimento della Montagna, with Lecco as its capital, the palace later belonged to the Stampa family of Soncino and then to local bourgeois owners. It reached the public administration through the comune of Castello in 1923 and the comune of Lecco in 1924, and in 1927 it became the seat of the civic museums, the role it has kept ever since.