On the walls are placed frescoes by Foppa and the early Milanese school, removed from demolished churches. Some beautiful miniatured books, Corali, Missals, Lives of the Saints, Bibles, etc., are ranged down the middle of the room on screens.
A small door at the end of this room opens into a way which leads by narrow staircases and passages and by a sort of drawbridge through the Torre di Bona into the Rocchetta. It was across here, by ways very strongly defended and almost impossible to force, that the little Duke Gian Galeazzo was hurried into the keep when he was stolen from his mother by the emissaries of Lodovico il Moro. The great rooms of the Rocchetta, once sacred to the fortunate existence of Lodovico and Beatrice, and now completely restored, contain the collections of Modern Art and the Museum of the Risorgimento, which is filled with deeply interesting memorials of that great recent moment of Milan’s history, when she showed herself splendidly true to her grand traditions as the leader of the Lombard League seven hundred years earlier. There is something curiously suggestive in the presence of these memorials here in the old home of Lodovico il Moro, who represents the height of the tyranny to which the city succumbed in the intervening centuries. As we glance round these renovated rooms we realise how victoriously she has at last swept that tyranny and all its sins and evil memories away, sacrificing with it inevitably the artistic and decorative beauty which partly redeemed it.
MILAN
In the Sala del Tesoro, on the ground floor, where modern sculpture is now exhibited, will be found the remains of a fresco by Bramante, representing Argus, a magnificent warrior figure, fit guardian of this chamber, which once held the famous treasure of the Sforza.
TABLE OF THE VISCONTI
TABLE OF THE SFORZA
