Casa Broggi

Casa Broggi stands at one of Milan's busiest crossings, where Via Dante, Via Meravigli and Via Santa Maria Segreta meet. Luigi Broggi designed the palace in 1891, working with his pupil Giuseppe Sommaruga, and gave it monumental scale. A church, San Nazaro in Pietrasanta, occupied the site until the late nineteenth century. Demolition then cleared the ground, and the palace rose in its place.

Look up and the decoration greets you: columns, floral friezes and telamons, sculpted male figures doing the work of pillars. The ensemble is eclectic by design, and its elegant lines mark a turn toward the Liberty style, Italy's answer to Art Nouveau. That movement, with its natural forms and intricate detail, was gaining ground across Italy. Then the Mansard roof completes the picture: a profile you expect in Paris, and one that reads as faintly foreign in Milan.

Broggi laid the building out for mixed use, with shops at street level and apartments above. He moved in himself once the work was done: the man who drew the roof also slept beneath it.