It’s a bit difficult to find the entrance to Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano because it’s not housed in a traditional ‘museum.’ Located in the Porta Venezia neighborhood of Milan, there is no grand museum entrance. Instead, you find it by entering one of the towering palazzos, or apartment buildings. It’s one of several of Milan’s ‘house museums,’ former residences that have been transformed to hold vast collections of art and antiquities, opening historic homes up to public view. What makes the former home of Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano special is its vast collection of twentieth-century art. In their lifetime, the socialite couple rubbed shoulders with famous artists and designers of the period, accumulating about 2,000 pieces from friends and icons alike. What results is a domestic space that holds both the memory of the family and the century alike.

in Milan, the former home of the former home of Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano now displays their collection of twentieth-century art | all images courtesy of Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano

The entrance to their former apartment is on the second floor of a building designed by Italian architect Piero Portaluppi between 1929 and 1931. It’s an older building reminiscent of a bygone era for Milan—the floors are mosaic tiles formed in a triangular pattern, and a spiraling staircase running the circumference of the building’s interior leads you to the entrance. The walls are a trompe l’oeil of painted stone. The building was commissioned by Marieda Di Stefano’s father, who envisioned the multistory building as a series of units for his children to live in side by side.

Greeting visitors in the entrance hall of their former residence are two paintings of the couple: I coniugi Boschi (1951) and I coniugi Boschi (1947), which roughly translates to The Boschi couple, or Mr. and Mrs. Boschi. They are half-length portraits of the pair holding their cats, created four years apart by the painter Remo Brindisi. The Italian painter himself has his own house museum dedicated to his works outside of Bologna, designed by the famed Italian architect Nanda Vigo.

view of a guest room in the residence housing paintings like Arturo Tosi’s Songavazzo (1925) and Achille Funi’s Trieste (1933) among others

The couple was deeply situated in the Milanese community. Antonio Boschi was a longtime engineer for the high-end tire manufacturer Pirelli, known for its involvement in Formula 1 racing. Marieda Di Stefano studied ceramics and continued to practice her passion throughout her lifetime, with a few of her pieces displayed in the house. Upon their passing, their collections were entrusted to the Municipality of Milan. The collection would be exhibited at Palazzo Reale in 1974 while a more permanent exhibition space was sought.

the entrance to the house museum with a view of ceramic plates created by Marieda Boschi Di Stefano

After some renovations, the former home of the couple was modified to accommodate the works. The house museum at Via Giorgio Jan, 15, which is beautiful, pristine, and filled with filtered natural light, was not the state of the house while it was being lived in. The couple stored a huge collection in this space. It was so vast that the entirety couldn’t possibly fit on the available wall space.

Photographs taken by Gabriele Basilico in 1982 create a kind of faithful capture of how the home would have looked when occupied by Boschi and Di Stefano. This series was commissioned by Italian Radical design figure and Domus editor Alessandro Mendini (who was also Marieda Di Stefano’s grandson). The floors were covered in a patchwork of what looks to be Persian carpets. There were huge canvases stacked upon each other and leaning against the wall. There were framed paintings puzzle-pieced together to take advantage of all the vertical surfaces that existed between floor and ceiling.