“Casa del Podestà” Museum

The “Casa del Podestà” was built towards the middle of the fifteenth century as the seat of the representative of Venice, who was responsible for controlling the territory.

Lonato was subjected to the domination of the Serenissima Republic of Venice from 1441 for over 350 years, interrupted only by the brief government of the Marquis Francesco Gonzaga (from 1509 to 1516).
After Napoleon ceded Venice to Austria, the Casa del Podestà first became the property of the Austrian state property (which made it a barracks) and later to the Municipality of Lonato which was completely uninterested in the building.
In 1906 it was purchased at a public auction by the then lawyer and liberal deputy Ugo Da Como. The latter, aware of the historical importance of the place, had it completely “restored” by the greatest architect from Brescia: Antonio Tagliaferri (1835-1909).
The client’s intent was to restore the ancient dignity of the Venetian building by equipping it with a series of suitable furnishings that would make it a house-museum to live in, according to a very widespread fashion between the 19th and 20th centuries.
The house was inhabited until 1941 by Ugo Da Como who died in Lonato and by his wife Maria Glisenti who died in 1944. The identity of this bourgeois residence has remained unchanged to this day.
The Casa del Podestà is a real “library house” which preserves a collection of approximately 50,000 volumes which can be counted among the most important private collections in northern Italy.
It is part of a monumental complex of extraordinary beauty, dominated by the grandiose Visconti-Venetian fortress.