PIERO PORTALUPPI AND TOMASO BUZZI AS A REPRESENTATION OF THE UPPER MIDDLE CLASS, VILLA NECCHI CAMPIGLIO IN MILAN IS A RECORD OF REGRETS AND INVOLUTIONS IN THE PATH FROM ARISTOCRATIC TRADITION TO ENTREPRENEURIAL MODERNITY

摘要

One evening in the early 1930s, while driving back to Pavia after a performance at Milan's Scala opera house, Gigina Necchi and Angelo Cam-piglio got lost in the infamous local fog. They stopped in front of a garden full of tall trees, and on its gate was a "For Sale" sign. So began the vicissitudes of an urban villa and its unusual family of Lombard entrepreneurs comprising a husband and wife and her sister Nedda, heirs of the renowned sewing machine corporation. Their habits did not exactly adhere to the accepted models of tradition, but to an extrovert dimension of hospitality, to a discretion expressed in the urban image of the villa on Via Mozart, and to the most courageously modern tastes not far removed from the industrial source of their fortunes.