Why you should experience Spazio Tadini in Milan, Italy.
Spazio Tadini is an intimate artistic house where Casoretto's residential character meets a family printing legacy, Emilio Tadini's multidisciplinary practice and a former industrial workplace preserved as an active center for contemporary culture.
Set along Via Niccolò Jommelli near Via Porpora and just steps from the eastern edge of Piazzale Loreto, the museum occupies a 1920s building created for a printing works within the dense residential fabric between Casoretto and Città Studi. Large rooms inherited from the former Grafiche Marucelli plant retain high ceilings, broad spans and an industrial directness beside the more personal proportions of Emilio Tadini's former studio and living quarters. Moving through the building establishes the primary encounter through this collision of domestic rooms, artist's workplace, library and former printing spaces. Paintings, books, photographic activity and surviving printing equipment deepen that encounter by keeping several generations of creative work physically connected under one roof. The result is a house museum whose character comes from continuity, preserving the place where printing, writing, painting and family life accumulated across the twentieth century before Francesco Tadini and Melina Scalise opened it to a wider cultural life.
What you should know about Spazio Tadini.
Spazio Tadini is best known for preserving Emilio Tadini's Milanese home and studio inside the former Grafiche Marucelli printing complex, then transforming that family inheritance into a museum founded by his son Francesco Tadini and Melina Scalise. The building's history began with Ugolino Marucelli, who founded Grafiche Marucelli in 1915, initially operated on Via Manuzio and subsequently transferred the company to a purpose-built reinforced-concrete structure on Via Jommelli during the 1920s. Giuseppe Tadini and C. Origgi acquired the enterprise after Marucelli's death, bringing the printing works into the family that would remain attached to the property for generations. Giuseppe directed operations during World War II before his early death, after which his son Giovanni Tadini assumed control in 1946 as his brother Emilio pursued literature and painting. The plant produced publications including L'Esercente, Il Corriere Agricolo Commerciale and L'Impresa Moderna, connecting the building with a branch of Milanese publishing devoted to commerce and economic education. Grafiche Marucelli also preserved a nineteenth-century Amos Dell'Orto press, an artifact that survived the disappearance of most machinery from the plant. Emilio established his atelier in another portion of the family property and worked there until his death in 2002, placing his artistic career physically beside the printing business from which he had chosen a different path. Francesco subsequently acquired the former plant and his father's studio, undertaking their conversion with Melina Scalise before opening the first Spazio Tadini events in 2006. Their project became the Associazione Spazio Tadini in 2008, joining preservation of Emilio's work to exhibitions, photography, literature, music, theater and dance. Entry into the Storie Milanesi network in 2015 formalized another stage in that transformation, as a family printing plant and artist's workplace became a house museum whose history remained embedded in the same rooms.
Emilio Tadini's archive gives the house museum its deeper connection to Milan's postwar artistic culture. Tadini developed simultaneously as painter, novelist, poet, critic and journalist, and his visual career included long associations with Studio Marconi and later Galleria Giò Marconi. Seven large triptychs appeared at Studio Marconi in 1990, followed by Oltremare at Galerie du Centre in Paris in 1992 and a Milan presentation of new work the following year. Villa delle Rose in Bologna presented eight triptychs from Il ballo dei filosofi in 1995 before a major exhibition traveled through museums in Stralsund, Bochum and Darmstadt into 1996 with a monograph by Arturo Carlo Quintavalle. Tadini served as president of Accademia di Brera from 1997 to 2000, extending a career developed through painting and literature into the leadership of one of Milan's principal artistic institutions. Palazzo Reale mounted Emilio Tadini. Opere 1959/2000 in 2001, the final major retrospective held during his lifetime. After his death, Fondazione Corriere della Sera organized Le figure, le cose at Palazzo Reale in 2004 with participants including Umberto Eco, Paolo Fabbri, Arturo Carlo Quintavalle and Valerio Adami, followed in 2007 by Emilio Tadini 1960-1985. L'occhio della pittura across Fondazione Marconi, Fondazione Mudima and Accademia di Brera. Spazio Tadini preserves this career through the permanent collection, library and archive inside the building where Tadini worked, giving the Via Jommelli rooms a direct connection to an artistic life that repeatedly crossed painting, writing and Milanese cultural institutions.
How to fold Spazio Tadini into your trip.
Spazio Tadini works as the anchor for a daytime exploration between Casoretto and Città Studi through three sites that carry the surrounding district from a fifteenth-century monastic foundation through Milanese twentieth-century collecting into Gio Ponti's postwar experiments with sacred architecture.
Begin at Santa Maria Bianca della Misericordia, where Pietro Tanzi restored an existing chapel in 1404 and requested canons from Santa Maria della Frigionaia in Lucca to establish a religious community on his Casoretto property. Tanzi left his possessions to the foundation in 1405 on the condition that six canons remain there, and the community elected its first prior in 1406. Construction of the later church accelerated during the 1470s under Guiniforte Solari, supported by Visconti and Sforza patronage as the monastery developed a significant humanistic library. The bell tower reached completion in 1490, and the complex gained abbey status in 1566 before Carlo Borromeo formed a close devotional association with the image of the Madonna Bianca preserved there. Continue to Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano, housed in the apartment Antonio Boschi and Marieda Di Stefano occupied inside the residential building Piero Portaluppi designed between 1929 and 1931 for Marieda's father, Francesco Di Stefano. Boschi and Di Stefano assembled more than 2,000 works and formed close relationships with contemporary artists, creating a collection spanning Novecento Italiano, Corrente, Giorgio Morandi, Filippo de Pisis, Lucio Fontana, Spatialism and Informalism. Antonio donated the collection to Milan through gifts in 1974 and 1988, and the museum opened in 2003 with about 300 works displayed across eleven rooms in the couple's former apartment. Portaluppi's angular building, the surviving domestic setting and the density of the collection preserve a distinctly twentieth-century Milanese model of private patronage transformed into a public institution. Conclude at Chiesa di San Luca Evangelista, whose origins lay in the rapid residential expansion around Città Studi during the 1950s. Archbishop Giovanni Battista Montini established the new parish in 1957, initially placing its chapel, archive and priest's residence inside a Via Jommelli apartment capable of holding only 60 to 70 people. Gio Ponti received the commission for a permanent church through the diocesan new-church program and developed the project with Antonio Fornaroli and Alberto Rosselli; foundations for the apsidal section were poured on February 6, 1959, and construction finished the following year. Tapered reinforced-concrete supports shape the interior and reappear across the folded entrance facade, as ceramic facing and the steep roof turn structural elements into the principal architectural composition. Cardinal Giovanni Colombo consecrated San Luca on October 22, 1966, completing the transition from a temporary Jommelli apartment to one of Ponti's distinctive Milanese churches. The progression moves from Solari's Renaissance monastery through Portaluppi's apartment for twentieth-century collectors into Ponti's postwar church, placing Spazio Tadini within an eastern Milanese district where private patronage, artistic production and architecture repeatedly generated institutions that outlived their original domestic settings.
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