Museo Bagatti Valsecchi

Fausto Bagatti Valsecchi (1843–1914) and his brother Giuseppe (1845–1934) both read law and neither of them practised it. What they did instead, through the 1880s, was rebuild the family house on Via Gesù as a High Renaissance Lombard palazzo — completed in 1883, with the exteriors reworked and reworked again until 1887 — and then fill it with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Bellini, Zenale, Giampietrino; armour, textiles, maiolica, inlaid furniture. Not a period room set up by a museum. A period house, built to be lived in, by two men who preferred four hundred years ago.

The joke — and they knew it was one — is the plumbing. Central heating, running water and electric light all went in, and all of it was hidden inside Renaissance-looking joinery. The shower is concealed in a white marble washing-fountain with carved shells, so that what looks like a Botticelli backdrop will in fact produce hot and cold water. I have never seen a better argument that a house can be a costume without being a lie: they wanted the effect, they wanted the comfort, and they refused to give up either.

Go on a winter weekday and it is close to empty; the shops downstairs are the busiest pavement in Italy and nobody comes up. Give it longer than you think, because the objects are not the argument here — the carpentry is. Every panel, boss and coffer in these rooms was made in the 1880s to look older than it is, and the fun of the visit is deciding, room by room, which things are real and which are the brothers showing off.

Everything here was carved in the 1880s to look four hundred years old, and most of it succeeds. Look at the joins, not the objects.

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