Those Chic MILANESE

When Piero Portaluppi was your great-grandfather, everywhere in this city feels like home. But sometimes you need to leave the nest to make one of your own.

- Christopher garis

There is a sense of homecoming when you move into a building you have known most of your life. When my partner Nicolò Castellini Baldissera and I were preparing to move out of Casa degli Atellani, his family’s seat in Milan for five generations (see Elle Decor, August 2022), a chance phone call led us to our current home, a top-floor apartment in a palazzo in the Brera neighborhood.

The 1,200-square-foot apartment is in a building owned by Nicolò’s childhood best friend, Bruno Sforni, and it was during a casual call that Sforni mentioned that it was vacant. In 2022 Bernard Arnault bought Casa degli Atellani—including the Leonardo da Vinci vineyard at its center—and we, along with Nicolò’s father Piero and numerous other family members who lived in the family compound, were looking for new homes.

Nicolò met Sforni when they were classics students in high school in Milan with a shared love of the arts. He often visited his friend’s family home, the Palazzo Recalcati Taglia-sacchi. “I spent countless afternoons in their drawing room overlooking the garden, with the Orto Botanico di Brera’s towering trees just beyond the walls,” Nicolò says. “It was a house filled with women: Bruno’s mother, sisters, grandmothers. Even their dogs were female. And it held treasures:

In his late father’s study, I remember being awestruck by a collection of Modigliani drawings, an early lesson in art connoisseurship that would stay with me.”