Brambilla Morpurgo Palace

The building that since 1998 has housed the National Library was put up between 1840 and 1843 on a project by the architect Francesco Bruyn (Trieste, 1792 - 1859), in a period of middle-class residential expansion in this area of the city.

The person that commissioned the building, Giuseppe Brambilla, never lived there: he first leased and then sold it to Elio Morpurgo, and it remained the property of the latter's family until 1924.

Between the two wars it was the headquarters of the fascist Militia and the fascist Union of Industrial Workers. Then in 1983 it became the property of the CGIL, CISL and UIL Union Confederations.

In 1988 it was declared to be a building of particular historical and artistic interest, and in 1991 it was purchased by the Ministry for the Cultural and Environment Heritage, which had it completely restored.

The building, which has a neoclassical look on the outside, reflects the taste of the upper-middle class society of the day in the rich decoration of the interior and the multiplicity of styles adopted.

The rooms were renovated several times to adapt to changing fashions, as we can still see from the frescoes, showing varied inspiration, and from the stuccoes that enrich the ceilings of the rooms on the piano nobile, which restoration has made it possible to appreciate to the full; these can be ascribed to the second half of the nineteenth- century.

The historic rooms on the first floor can be freely visited by small groups of people; an application has to be made to the staff on duty.