History

Alfredo Campanini graduated from Milan’s Accademia di Brera in 1896 and spent the following decade absorbing the currents that were transforming European civic architecture. The decisive influence was close to home: Giuseppe Sommaruga’s Palazzo Castiglioni on Corso Venezia, completed in 1904, which demonstrated that a Milanese residential block could carry the full weight of sculptural ornament without structural apology. Campanini took the lesson and applied it, with comparable ambition, to a smaller scale.

Construction of his own house began in 1904 and was finished by 1906. For the portal sculptures Campanini turned to Michele Vedani, a decorative sculptor whose two allegorical figures — representing Painting and Sculpture — stand in artificial stone and merge seamlessly into the facade cladding on either side of the entrance. The wrought iron elements, including the entrance gate, parapets, and secondary railings, are attributed to Alessandro Mazzucotelli, whose Milan workshop was the pre-eminent supplier of ornamental ironwork in the peninsula during the Art Nouveau years. Mazzucotelli’s characteristic language — tendrils and blossoms that seem to grow rather than be forged — appears here in the gate’s interlaced stems and in the stair banisters visible through the atrium glass.

The building remained a private residence after Campanini’s death in 1926. A restoration completed in the late twentieth century addressed the ironwork in particular, returning it to its original painted patina. The facade’s polychrome stained glass and surface stucco, both designed by Campanini himself, were also stabilised during that campaign. Casa Campanini is catalogued in the Lombardia Beni Culturali register (LMD80-00318) and stands as one of the defining examples of Milanese Liberty alongside the buildings Campanini himself designed on Via Carlo Pisacane between 1904 and 1907.