History

In 1912 engineer Luigi Faccanoni commissioned Giuseppe Sommaruga to design a city villa that would reflect the ambitions of Milan’s industrial upper class. Sommaruga was at the height of his influence: Sommaruga’s celebrated Palazzo Castiglioni on Corso Venezia (1901–1904) had already made him the defining voice of Milanese Liberty, and the Faccanoni commission gave him room to refine the language on a residential scale. The building permit received legal approval in April 1913; the villa was completed the following year.

At the time of its completion two statues by sculptor Ernesto Bazzaro were installed on the façade. These were not new works: the same figures had originally adorned the entrance portal of Palazzo Castiglioni, where their frank nudity had provoked such public controversy that they were removed after public protest — earning Palazzo Castiglioni the ironic Milanese nickname “Ca’ di ciapp”. Sommaruga placed them here in 1914 without incident, perhaps because the Pagano neighbourhood was then less central and less scrutinised.

In 1919 the villa passed to Nicola Romeo, the engineer and industrialist who had acquired the Milanese carmaker A.L.F.A. in 1915 and renamed it Alfa Romeo in 1920. The property retained his name, and it is by the hyphenated form — Villa Romeo-Faccanoni — that the building is most commonly cited in heritage registers. Between 1938 and 1940, architect Gioà Ponti oversaw an extension and internal reorganisation that adapted the structure as a private clinic. The Clinica Columbus formally opened in 1949, named in honour of the Columbus Hospital founded in New York by the Lombard missionary Mother Cabrini at the close of the nineteenth century. The clinic has operated continuously on the site ever since, and the building has appeared in every edition of the FAI “I Luoghi del Cuore” campaign since 2016, a sign of persistent civic affection for a building that most Milanese know only from its street-facing facade.