The Boschi Di Stefano House-Museum exhibits – in the rooms inhabited by Antonio Boschi (1896-1988) and Marieda Di Stefano (1901-1968) – a selection of about three hundred of the more than two thousand works from their collection, donated to the City of Milan in 1974.
The collection is an extraordinary testimony to the history of Italian art in the 20th century – including paintings, sculptures and drawings – from the first decade of the 20th century to the end of the 1960s.
The works
In the eleven exhibition spaces of the Boschi Di Stefano House-Museum there are about three hundred of the more than two thousand works collected by Antonio and Marieda Boschi Di Stefano, distributed according to a chronological sequence and qualitative selection criterion curated by Maria Teresa Fiorio, former Director of the Civiche Raccolte d’Arte of Milan.
At the entrance there are the portraits dedicated to the Boschi couple and the ceramics by Marieda herself and through a corridor with paintings by Severini and Boccioni you reach the "Italian twentieth century room" with works by Funi, Marussig, Tozzi, Carrà and Casorati.
The furniture
Among Antonio Boschi’s testamentary wishes was that the apartment in via Jan 15, where he and Marieda had lived for a long time, should be open to the public as a house-museum, hosting a selection of the works they had collected. For reasons of safety and conservation, it was not possible to maintain the original integrity of what Ornella Selvafolta describes as "an inhabited museum" where "the spaces, the layout, the furnishings are almost ‘submitted’ to the reasons of art".
Collectors
In 1927 the married life of Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano began. They met the previous year during a holiday in Val Sesia and immediately decided to get married, but the social conventions of the time imposed a period of engagement. He, born in 1896, is a young engineer of Novara origin,
Marieda, born in Milan in 1901, already breathes the passion for art in her family, her father Francesco is a collector of works especially of the twentieth century sarfattiano. Attracted by the material and colouristic possibilities offered by ceramics, Marieda after regular studies takes lessons in the studio of the sculptor Luigi Amigoni. Over the years she exhibited, with recognition, in many exhibitions not only national. The foundation of the Ceramics School, which bears her name, dates back to 1962.
