Museo Borgogna

Collector Antonio Borgogna turned his house into a museum for Vercelli. At the Museo Borgogna, some eight hundred works spanning the fifteenth to the twenty-first century hang across three floors of an intimate palazzo, preserving its house-museum character alongside its art collection.

Why it matters

The museum exists because of one man's testament. Antonio Borgogna was a philanthropist and impassioned art lover who shaped his collection — painting, sculpture, graphic work and the decorative arts, with a marked preference for old masters — as a living environment rather than a warehouse. On his death he left the collection and house to the city, and the museum was instituted from his testamentary bequest in 1907, preserving the domestic setting.

What to notice

The collection spans painting, sculpture, graphic work and decorative arts from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Giuseppe and Pompeo Bertini's stained-glass panel "Il trionfo di Dante" is among its notable works. The Sala Araba reflects the nineteenth-century taste represented in Borgogna's house.

Context and history

Antonio Borgogna assembled his collection in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Vercelli's bourgeois families were defining the city's cultural institutions. His bequest followed a pattern of civic philanthropy with a distinctive domestic character: he left his house and its contents together, preserving the relationship between the collection and its setting.