Self-guided walk

The architect who built your building

Four Art Nouveau stops on a half-hour walk from via Malpighi 3, following Giovanni Battista Bossi.

4
stops, plus the hall
< 1
kilometre on foot
20–30
minutes
Free
always, for anyone

Whoever books here does not book an apartment in a historic building. They book an apartment inside the work of a man who, in the space of a few years, put up four palazzi within a quarter of an hour on foot from here. This walk goes to two of them.

His name was Giovanni Battista Bossi. He was born in Novara in 1864 and died in Milan in 1924. You will not find him listed next to Sommaruga or Portaluppi in the guidebooks. And yet, between 1902 and 1906, he left more Art Nouveau in this corner of Porta Venezia than anyone else.

This walk takes about half an hour, stays inside six hundred metres, and it does not take you to the famous places. It takes you to see what happens when one architect tries different answers to the same problem, all within a few steps of each other.

We start where you are.

The map

Scroll the map sideways to see all of it.

The architect who built your building Illustrated map of the walk. Piazza Oberdan is the junction from which corso Buenos Aires runs north, viale Piave runs south and via Malpighi runs east. From the entrance hall of Casa Galimberti, at via Malpighi 3 on the corner of via Sirtori, you step outside and follow via Malpighi eastwards to Casa Guazzoni at number 12, on the corner of via Melzo. You cross via Melzo and immediately after, on the corner of via Frisi, stands the former Cinema Dumont. From there you walk back along via Malpighi to piazza Oberdan and down viale Piave for about a hundred metres, to the Kursaal Diana at number 42. Your own front door is a hundred metres away. Schematic map, not to scale. The architect who built your building Four Art Nouveau stops around via Malpighi under 1 km · 20–30 minutes 0 The entrance hall the stop only guests can make piazza Oberdan corso Buenos Aires via Malpighi via Sirtori via Melzo via Frisi viale Piave CINEMATOGRAFO 1 2 3 4 0 Casa Galimbertivia Malpighi 3G. B. Bossi, 1902–1905 Casa Guazzonivia Malpighi 12G. B. Bossi, 1903–1906 Former Cinema Dumontvia Frisi 2Tettamanzi and Mainetti, 1908–1910 Kursaal Dianaviale Piave 42Achille Manfredini, 1907–1908 we start here cross over N Key the walk the way home, a hundred metres Schematic map, not to scale. The order of the stops and the connections between the streets are correct; the distances and proportions are not. Times are approximate. Original drawing · Casa Galimberti Heritage Apartment
Original drawing by Casa Galimberti Heritage Apartment. Schematic map, not to scale: it shows the order of the stops, not the real distances.

One rule

Apart from the first, you look at everything from the outside. These are private buildings and people live in them: do not ring bells, do not walk into entrance halls.

Only if you are staying here

The entrance hall

If you are a guest at Casa Galimberti Heritage Apartment, the first stop comes before you even step outside, and nobody else can make it.

A restoration in the late 1990s brought back the interior decoration of the entrance hall and the stairwell, which echoes the floral motifs of the facades, starting from the porter’s area. It is the only Art Nouveau interior on this walk that you can actually enter, and you pass through it every day without looking.

Look now. In two minutes you will see the same motifs from outside, in painted ceramic, four storeys tall.

One favour: people live here. Keep your voice down, no tripods, and please do not ring anyone else’s bell.

The stops

Casa Galimberti

via Malpighi 3

Giovanni Battista Bossi, 1902–1905

Step out, cross the street, and turn around.

Sixty-eight metres of facade across via Malpighi and via Sirtori, and roughly one hundred and seventy square metres of polychrome decoration. Bossi carved nothing here. He had it painted. The ceramic tiles are kiln-fired, the work of Brambilla and Pinzauti: the ornament by Pio Pinzauti, the figures by Ferdinando Brambilla.

On the first floor, on the via Malpighi side, there are nine female figures and three male. On the via Sirtori side, five female and one male. Count them. It takes a minute, and it is the best way to notice that they do not repeat.

Above, from the second floor up, floral motifs take over, and the wrought iron by the Arcari workshop draws the balustrades.

Look down as well, where nobody ever looks: the base is in ceppo gentile, a cheap stone brought in from the quarries at Trezzo along the Martesana canal. Its only job is to keep the damp out of the walls. Remember it, because that canal comes back at the end of the walk.

And hold on to one more thing: here the decoration is applied. It is a skin. Underneath it there is a building that stands up on its own.

Eighty metres ahead, the same architect did the exact opposite.

Casa Guazzoni

via Malpighi 12

Giovanni Battista Bossi, 1903–1906

Same street, same architect, same years. Opposite solution.

Bossi built Casa Guazzoni between 1903 and 1906 on the corner of via Malpighi and via Melzo, for a master builder. This time he did not apply the decoration: he made it the structure. The cement and the iron here are not cladding. They carry load.

Look up at the corner: two balconies stacked and joined to each other, held up two different ways. The lower one, in stone, rests on a row of putti pretending to take the weight. The upper one is carried on paired iron columns, thin as nothing.

Then run your eye upwards and notice something. The higher you go, the simpler the decoration gets. At the top of the ground floor there are female faces in cement, an arm’s length from anyone walking past; above them, putti and garlands; at the top, only wrought-iron spirals. That iron is by Alessandro Mazzucotelli, the best known smith of Italian Art Nouveau.

That is not laziness. The facade was designed for someone walking past.

Milanese Art Nouveau was not a creed, it was a repertoire. Architects reached for it when it served, and put it away when it did not.

Eighty metres, the same years, one architect, and two opposite ideas of what a facade is. This is the most useful thing you will take away from this walk.

Now that you know how Bossi worked, cross via Melzo and look at who was copying him.

Former Cinema Dumont

via Frisi 2

Ferdinando Tettamanzi and Giovanni Mainetti, 1908–1910

You are on the other side of the street. Two years later.

In 1908, just as Bossi was finishing his houses behind us, two architects almost nobody remembers, Ferdinando Tettamanzi and Giovanni Mainetti, started work on this corner on one of the first cinemas in Milan built specifically for the purpose. It opened in 1910, with five hundred and sixteen seats in twenty rows. They called it the Dumont, a French surname. Why, no document says.

Look only at the corner: that is where the decoration is concentrated, with floral motifs in the French taste, while the flank on via Melzo was never decorated at all. High on the facade ran the word CINEMATOGRAFO, later erased.

Now compare it with what you have just seen. The vocabulary is the same, the grammar is not: here the decoration is a billboard placed on the good corner, not an argument about the building. This is second-hand Art Nouveau, and fifty metres from the original you can tell.

Now we walk back, towards Porta Venezia.

Kursaal Diana

viale Piave 42

Achille Manfredini, 1907–1908

This was the Bagni di Diana, the first public swimming pool in Italy, opened in 1842: a hundred metres by twenty-five, a hundred and twenty changing cabins, and water from the Gerenzana, a stream fed by the Martesana canal. The same canal that, sixty years later, brought in the stone of the base you started from.

In 1907 Achille Manfredini built a kursaal on top of it: hotel, restaurant, ballroom, a court for the Basque ball game, and a theatre seating eight hundred and fifty. Art Nouveau applied to mass entertainment, opening on the first of October 1908.

On 23 March 1921, during a performance, a bomb went off in the theatre. Twenty-one people were killed and eighty injured. It was the deadliest bombing Italy had seen.

The building is still here. Worth thirty seconds of silence. Then your front door is a hundred metres away.

At the end

Two buildings by Giovanni Battista Bossi eighty metres apart, one that imitates him from across the street, and one that tells you how entertainment ended in Milan in 1921. All inside six hundred metres.

The figures you counted at the start now have a context: they were the choice of a man who, in the same years and the same streets, had tried everything else as well.

If you want to keep going

There are three more Bossi buildings nearby that this walk does not reach, all in different directions. Casa Bossi, at viale Piave 11–13, towards piazza del Tricolore: two full floors of heavy rustication and a dense run of stone balconies on carved corbels, which is the exact opposite of what you have just seen, by the same architect in the same years. Worth the extra ten minutes only if the comparison caught your interest.

Casa Alessio, at via Lamberto De Bernardi 1, is his most German work: sinuous but austere lines, tall windows alternating curved and straight, mascarons set into the front, and his usual wrought iron on the side sections. Jugendstil instead of the Milanese celebration. Casa Centenara is usually given as corso Buenos Aires 66, but the sources disagree on that one: see the notes.

And if you want textbook Art Nouveau, the kind that is in every guidebook, Palazzo Castiglioni by Giuseppe Sommaruga is at corso Venezia 47, a quarter of an hour from here. But everyone knows that one.

Notes and sources

Where this comes from, and where the sources disagree
  • Construction dates for Milanese Art Nouveau buildings differ between sources. Casa Galimberti: 1902–1905 per the SIRBeC record of the Lombardy Region, 1904 per the Italian national heritage catalogue, 1903–1905 per Wikipedia. Casa Guazzoni: 1903–1906 per the SIRBeC record, 1905 per the national catalogue, 1904–1906 per Wikipedia. The ranges used here are those of the regional records, which are also the only ones that explain where they come from.
  • The sixty-eight metres of facade is the figure given by the SIRBeC record. Wikipedia instead gives the two fronts separately, at thirty-two and thirty-three metres.
  • The count of figures on Casa Galimberti (nine female and three male on the via Malpighi side, five female and one male on via Sirtori) follows the Italian Wikipedia entry.
  • The ceramic decoration of Casa Galimberti is attributed by the SIRBeC record to Brambilla and Pinzauti as a pair. The split between Pinzauti’s ornament and Brambilla’s figures, and the attribution of the tile production to the Società Ceramica Lombarda, come from secondary sources.
  • The wrought iron of Casa Galimberti is attributed by the SIRBeC record to the Arcari workshop, with no second name. Treccani writes «Arcari e Bellori», Wikipedia «Arcari e Bellomi», which is why only Arcari appears here. The iron of Casa Guazzoni is by Alessandro Mazzucotelli in both sources: guides that give Mazzucotelli to Casa Galimberti are confusing the two buildings.
  • Why the cinema was called the Dumont is not documented by any source, neither the regional record nor the archival reconstruction. The explanations in circulation cite nothing, which is why none is repeated here. Note also that via Frisi 8, which appears in some sources, is not an error: it was the street number in 1908.
  • Casa Centenara is given as corso Buenos Aires 66 in the popular literature, but Treccani attributes to Bossi a building at corso Buenos Aires 52 without naming it, and places a «casa Centenari» at corso Vercelli 38. No institutional record confirms number 66.
  • The length and duration of the walk are estimates, not measurements. The only calculated distances are Casa Galimberti to Casa Guazzoni (seventy-eight metres) and Casa Galimberti to the Kursaal Diana (about a hundred metres), derived from the coordinates in the national catalogue records.
  • Main sources: SIRBeC records of the Lombardy Region LMD80-00393 (Casa Galimberti), LMD80-00392 (Casa Guazzoni), LMD80-00391 (former Cinema Dumont) and 1j590-00016 (Kursaal Diana, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore); Italian national heritage catalogue records 00101746 and 00101748; Treccani, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, entry Bossi, Giovanni Battista; Italian and English Wikipedia.
  • The map and the texts are original, produced for Casa Galimberti Heritage Apartment. No third-party photographs are used on this page.

The rest of the site

This walk starts at the front door of an apartment you can book. If sleeping inside it appeals to you, the rest of the site is here.

See the apartment