A century between Milanese Art Nouveau and Italian Operetta
The history of this noble Milanese residence began in 1907, with the renovation of a 19th-century building commissioned by Giuseppe Pirola. At the time, it was only a warehouse for vehicles and grain linked to agricultural activities in the Milanese countryside, no more than a couple of kilometres away, beyond the Spanish walls. The area, overlooking the terracing of the Sforza Castle, was under the spiritual jurisdiction of the basilica of San Simpliciano and was crossed by the road artery to Como (the Borgo di Porta Comasina).
The palace as we see it today, however, is the result of a subsequent, radical, artistic modernisation of that building, financed and undertaken by the Neapolitan nobleman Carlo Lombardo dei Baroni di San Chirico in the mid-1920s.
Arrived in Milan at the end of the 19th century, Lombardo was already a prominent personality in the musical field, encouraged in his career by Johann Strauss’ son. He became an operetta composer, librettist and chose this Palazzo as the headquarters of his Music Publishing House, founded a few years earlier in 1918. The work was completed in 1926 and from then on, until the outbreak of World War II, the most important national operetta heritage was stored here.
This is where the protagonists of the great Italian operetta would meet and where the original scores of famous operettas such as Cin Ci La (1925), La casa innamorata (1929) or the even more famous Paese dei Campanelli (1923) staged for the first time at the iconic Teatro Lirico Internazionale have been preserved. The building was modernised in a style reminiscent of the eclecticism of the early 20th century, winking at Milanese Art Nouveau and Neoclassicism. A wooden entrance door, embellished with high-reliefs, leads into a hallway that echoes the dancing decorative motifs of the façade, but is complemented by wrought-iron chandeliers and splendid stained-glass windows (partially damaged during World War II) made by the artistic glassworks of Salvatore Corvaya and Carlo Bazzi of Milan. The heraldic coat of arms of the Lombardo family, from which Carlo had taken his famous pseudonym: Leon Bard (due to the presence of a Lion) can still be found in this room. The hallway leads to a courtyard, in which there was an OTIS lift, one of the first installed outdoors in Milan (also damaged during the war).
An inscription in Latin runs along the interior facades “Gloriam Ausoniae, Musa Cantu, Per Orbem Terram”, a metaphor with which Lombardo expresses his desire to glorify Italy, through music, for the whole world.
