Palazzo Bigli Samoyloff
On Via Borgonuovo in Milan stands Palazzo Bigli Samoyloff, its Neoclassical façade the work of a nineteenth-century restoration. Smooth ashlar lines the ground floor, and a grand balcony runs above windows crowned with triangular pediments. Behind that front, the building has taken several shapes across five centuries.
The Humiliati, a religious order, held it until Paolo Bigli, a chancellor and ducal ambassador, bought it in 1498. Two campaigns of rebuilding followed in the seventeenth century. Pietro Guido Bombarda began the work in 1619, and Gerolamo Quadrio later redesigned the courtyard arcade and frescoed the main floor. In the nineteenth century Countess Julija Pavlovna Samoyloff acquired it, and her lavish parties made it a social epicentre.
Inside you find a seventeenth-century courtyard, colonnaded on three sides with pink granite Tuscan columns. The ballroom once carried Giovanni Denin's Apotheosis of Napoleon Bonaparte across its walls. Second World War bombs left considerable damage inside. The façade outlasted them, and still shows its ashlar, balcony and pediments to the street.
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