One of the finest house museums in Italy, the lifework of the 19th-century nobleman Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli, who turned his family palazzo on Via Manzoni into a sequence of richly decorated rooms and left the whole thing to the city in 1879. Each room was designed in a different historical style — Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque — as a setting for the art.
The collection is small but exceptional: Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Mantegna, and, above all, Pollaiuolo's "Portrait of a Young Woman", a profile so famous it serves as the museum's emblem. Beyond the paintings there are arms and armour, antique clocks, Murano glass, and textiles. War damage destroyed parts of the building in 1943, but the restoration kept its character. It is an hour or two of concentrated quality, a short walk from the fashion streets.