Palazzo D'Arco

The palace stands as an ensemble of connected buildings organized around a garden enclosed by an exedra, a curved wall feature that closes the green space. The main façade faces Carlo D’Arco square and presents a neoclassical frontage with the principal doorway at its centre. An eighteenth-century remodelling added a three-flight stair that rises to the piano nobile, the noble floor from which the interior route begins.

Inside, rooms retain rich furnishings and specialized collections. A long hall called the Sala degli Antenati displays sixty family portraits. The library occupies a neoclassical room and holds more than ten thousand volumes, including a copy of Antonio Canova’s Three Graces. A nineteenth-century historic kitchen remains as a preserved service room, and other chambers contain musical instruments and the picture gallery, which holds paintings by artists such as Niccolò da Verona, Bernardino Luini, Alessandro Magnasco, Frans Pourbus the Younger, Anthony van Dyck and a cycle by Giuseppe Bazzani. The movable heritage includes an herbarium, archives, furniture and weapons alongside the printed and painted collections.

To the left of the main complex the former stables were adapted after 1946 into the Teatrino d’Arco, a small theatre that houses the Francesco Campogalliani Theatrical Academy. In the garden a pair of small Renaissance buildings from the fifteenth century open onto the green and one of these contains the Sala dello Zodiaco, a single-volume interior measuring about 9.70 by 15.40 by 6.30 metres. The Zodiac Room is covered with a painted program produced around 1515 by Giovanni Maria Falconetto with his pupils. All four walls display zodiac groups, with one sign on each short wall and five signs on each long wall so that opposite signs face one another; the image of the Scales (Libra) was partly lost when a fireplace was inserted, probably in the seventeenth century.

Decoration in the Zodiac Room combines repeated keystone masks and mascarons, heads including a bull and a Jupiter Ammon type, an eagle, grotesque ornament frames and medallions bearing portraits of emperors. Sixteen central narrative scenes draw mainly on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and typically show monthly activities in the foreground set against classical or late-antique building forms in the background. Below the Zodiac Room lies the Sala dei Cesari, which preserves copies of eleven imperial portraits originally executed in 1536 by Titian for Frederick II of Mantua.

A room named the Sala Cavriani displays works given to the foundation in 2014. Overall the complex presents a sequence of structural and decorative elements from the Renaissance through the neoclassical period, with later reuse evident in the theatre conversion and in nineteenth-century insertions such as the kitchen and the fireplace that altered parts of the painted cycle.