Archeologic museum Pisani Dossi villa

Villa Pisani Dossi stands in Corbetta, a town west of Milan in Lombardy. Built in the mid-1400s as a country house for the Varese da Rosate family, it passed through several noble owners before becoming the home of diplomat Carlo Dossi in 1892. Dossi, a leading figure in the Milanese Scapigliatura movement, turned the villa into a private museum of archaeology and a library. During restoration work in 1898 he uncovered original fourteenth-century features and recreated them, including pointed brick windows and a protruding chimney. The museum is arranged on two floors. Upstairs is Dossi’s collection of objects from Rome, Colombia and Greece, acquired during his diplomatic missions, whose exact find-spots are unknown. Downstairs is the archaeological display of local finds. The first room shows ten graves from Corbetta, a Lombard shield boss and swords. The second room holds material from Santo Stefano Ticino, and the third room displays three reconstructed ‘cappuccina’ tombs from Albairate and Riazzolo. These graves come from three cemeteries, one rich in Celtic items such as a rare coloured glass hairpin, another mainly Roman. The final room is devoted to the Scamozzina necropolis at Cisliano, where Dossi found the oldest objects, including a Neolithic axe from the third millennium BC. The villa also houses Dossi’s library of thousands of books and manuscripts, many from the 1600s and 1700s. Among them is a rare first-edition of Fiore dei Liberi’s Flos Duellatorum, one of the world’s oldest fencing manuals, and the only copy in Italy. The library preserves family archives of the Varese da Rosate and Mussi families, Dossi’s own notebooks and archaeological notes, and nine sixteenth-century prints by Albrecht Dürer, including Melencolia I and The Knight, Death and the Devil. The whole museum remains as Dossi arranged it, and is Italy’s first didactic archaeological display without electric lighting.