Palazzo Serbelloni

Palazzo Serbelloni stands on Corso Venezia in Milan, one of the first patrician palaces to rise along that street. It fronted the change that turned a once-suburban road into an elegant carriage route in the late Eighteenth century.

A Seventeenth-century house with medieval remnants occupied the site before Simone Cantoni gave the palace its neoclassical façade, completed in 1793. A grand loggia with a large tympanum dominates the front, dressed in stucco bas-reliefs by Francesco Carabelli. The reliefs show scenes from the life of Frederick Barbarossa. You can spot the atrium's trompe-l'œil frescoes from the street: they paint three dimensions onto flat walls. The monumental staircase and the ballroom did not survive the wartime bombings.

The Serbelloni family made the palace a gathering place for Milan's Enlightenment thinkers, among them Pietro Verri and Giuseppe Parini. Later it became famous for its lavish parties. Napoleon, Prince Metternich and Vittorio Emanuele II all came as guests, and a plaque on the façade commemorates them. The garden once stretched as far as today's Corso Monforte. In 1890 builders divided part of it to make room for the Institute for the Blind, and new streets carved through the remainder in the early Twentieth century. Today the rooms host events, while the loggia and its Barbarossa reliefs still face the traffic of Corso Venezia.