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The Boschi Di Stefano Museum-Home at number 15, Via Giorgio Jan, has been open to the public since February 2003. In these premises – once inhabited by the married couple Antonio Boschi (1896-1988) and Marieda Di Stefano (1901-1968) – about three-hundred pieces are exhibited selected from over two thousand works, donated to the City of Milan in 1974.
The collection – which comprises paintings, sculptures and drawings – is an extraordinary testimony to the history of Twentieth Century Italian art from the first decade to the end of the Sixties.
Photo: Václav Šedý
Antonio and Marieda Boschi Di Stefano collected over two thousand works. About three hundred of these have been selected for their quality and distributed in chronological order in the eleven exhibition areas of the Boschi Di Stefano Museum-Home by the curator Maria Teresa Fiorio, ex Director of the Civiche Raccolte d’Arte of Milan.
There are portraits of Boschi and Di Stefano at the entrance, with pottery by Marieda herself. From there, a corridor featuring canvases by Severini and Boccioni takes visitors to the “Twentieth Century Italian Room”, with works by Funi, Marussig, Tozzi, Carrà and Casorati.
Photo: Milano, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte
In his last will and testament, Antonio Boschi stipulated that the via Jan apartment, where he and Marieda had lived for so long, be opened to the public as a museum-home, hosting a selection of works from their collection. For reasons of security and conservation it was impossible to preserve intact what Ornella Selvafolta described as “an inhabited museum” whose “spaces, outfitting and furnishings seem almost overwhelmed by the works of art”.
Photo: Václav Šedý
Married life for Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano began in 1927. They had met the previous year, while on holiday in Val Sesia, and had immediately decided to get married, but the social conventions of the time imposed a period of engagement. Born in Novara in 1896, Boschi was a young engineer only recently employed by Pirelli, where he was to enjoy a brilliant career, as testified by numerous and important patents including, to give just one example, the GIUBO (Boschi Joint). Before that, he had been an airship crew member during WW1, and shortly after graduating he had worked for two years in Budapest in the railway sector. He had a great passion for music, especially for the violin.
Photo: Milano, Civiche Raccolte d’Arte
The Boschi Di Stefano Foundation was formed in 1998 thanks to the achievement of an agreement between the heirs of Antonio and Marieda Boschi and the City of Milan to ensure fulfilment of the wishes of Antonio Boschi in his last will and testament to have a selection of the works the couple had collected displayed in the home where he had lived with his wife. In co-operation with Philippe Daverio, then City Councillor for Arts and Culture, it was agreed to establish a Foundation administered on an equal basis by representatives of the City and representatives of the family – assisted by the then Director of the Civiche Raccolte d’Arte, Maria Teresa Fiorio, curator of the collection’s current selection and display arrangement.
Photo: Václav Šedý
