The Casa di Riposo per Musicisti (literally 'rest home for musicians') is a home for retired opera singers and musicians in

Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city ...

, northern

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

, founded by the Italian composer

Giuseppe Verdi Giuseppe Fortunino Francesco Verdi (; 9 or 10 October 1813 – 27 January 1901) was an Italian composer best known for his operas. He was born near Busseto to a provincial family of moderate means, receiving a musical education with the h ...

(whose statue is outside the building) in 1896. The building was designed in the

neo-Gothic style Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic, neo-Gothic, or Gothick) is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. The movement gained momentum and expanded in the first half of the 19th century, as increasingly ...

by Italian architect,

Camillo Boito Camillo Boito (; 30 October 1836 – 28 June 1914) was an Italian architect and engineer, and a noted art critic, art historian and novelist. Biography Boito was born in Rome, the son of an Italian painter of miniatures. His mother was of Poli ...

. Both Verdi and his wife,

Giuseppina Strepponi Clelia Maria Josepha (Giuseppina) Strepponi ( Lodi, 8 September 1815 – Villanova sull'Arda, 14 November 1897) was a nineteenth-century Italian operatic soprano of great renown and the second wife of composer Giuseppe Verdi. She is ofte ...

are buried there. A documentary film about life in the Casa di Riposo, '' Il Bacio di Tosca'' (''Tosca's Kiss'' in the US), was made in

1984 Events January * January 1 – The Bornean Sultanate of Brunei gains full independence from the United Kingdom, having become a British protectorate in 1888. * January 7 – Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeas ...

by the Swiss director

Daniel Schmid Daniel Walter Schmid (26 December 1941 – 5 August 2006) was a Swiss theatre and film director. Biography In 1982, his film ''Hécate'' was entered into the 33rd Berlin International Film Festival. His film ''Beresina, or the Last Days of Swi ...

History

In the last years of his life, Verdi wrote to his friend

Giulio Monteverde Giulio Monteverde (8 October 1837 – 3 October 1917) was an Italian naturalist sculptor and teacher. Biography Monteverde was born in Bistagno, Italy and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He later became a professor there.McKay, ...

Of all my works, that which pleases me the most is the Casa that I had built in Milan to shelter elderly singers who have not been favoured by fortune, or who when they were young did not have the virtue of saving their money. Poor and dear companions of my life!" Lubrani (2001) p. 82. Original Italian: "Delle mie opere, quella che mi piace di più è la Casa che ho fatto costruire a Milano per accogliervi i vecchi artisti di canto non favoriti dalla fortuna, o che non possedettero da giovani la virtù del risparmio. Poveri e cari compagni della mia vita!"

In 1888, Verdi had already built, equipped and managed a hospital in

Villanova sull'Arda Villanova sull'Arda ( egl, label= Piacentino, Vilanöva, or ) is a ''comune'' (municipality) in the Province of Piacenza in the Italian region Emilia-Romagna, located about northwest of Bologna and about east of Piacenza. The commune borders ...

, a town bordering the fields of his estate. The following year, he turned to his next philanthropic project, a home for retired opera singers and musicians who had fallen on hard times. In 1889, he wrote to Giulio Ricordi that he had acquired a large piece of empty land in Milan outside the Porta Garibaldi on which he planned to build his Casa di Riposo. He then announced his plans publicly in an 1891 interview in the ''Gazetta musicale di Milano''. Construction did not begin until 1896, but in the intervening years Verdi and wife,

, met frequently with the architect,

to plan the project. (Camillo Boito was the brother of Verdi's friend and

librettist A libretto (Italian for "booklet") is the text used in, or intended for, an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata or musical. The term ''libretto'' is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major litu ...

Arrigo Boito Arrigo Boito (; 24 February 1842 10 June 1918) (whose original name was Enrico Giuseppe Giovanni Boito and who wrote essays under the anagrammatic pseudonym of Tobia Gorrio) was an Italian poet, journalist, novelist, librettist and composer, best ...

.) He also sought out information on how other hospices for the elderly were run. In 1895, Verdi made provisions in his will to fund the Casa after his death, bequeathing the future royalties from his operas to the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti - Fondazione Giuseppe Verdi. Construction was completed in 1899, but Verdi did not want any residents to move in until after his death.

Notable residents

Gemma Bosini Gemma Bosini (1890 – 2 February 1982) was an Italian operatic soprano who had an active international performance career in 1909–1930. She is especially associated with the role of Alice Ford in Giuseppe Verdi's '' Falstaff'', a role which ...

Carlo Broccardi Carlo Broccardi (1886–1953) was an Italian operatic tenor who had an active international career during the first third of the 20th century. He notably sang for the first complete recordings of Giuseppe Verdi's '' Rigoletto'' (1915, the Duke o ...

Giuseppe Costa Giuseppe Costa (6 April 1852 – 1912) was an Italian painter, active mainly painting genre scenes. Biography He was born in Naples, and trained in the local Academy of Fine Arts under Domenico Morelli Domenico Morelli (4 August 182313 August ...

Gilda Dalla Rizza Gilda Dalla Rizza (12 October 18925 July 1975) was an important Italian soprano. Born in Verona, she made her operatic debut in Bologna (the Teatro Verdi) in 1912, as Charlotte in '' Werther''. Especially acclaimed in the verismo repertory, s ...

Sara Scuderi Sara Scuderi (December 11, 1906 – December 24, 1987) was an Italian opera singer. She sang widely in Italy and Europe (most notably in the Netherlands), having had a seven-year contract at La Scala, "where she received high praise for her int ...

* Mariano Stabile

References

Sources *Biggi, Maria Ida
"Camillo Boito"
in Marrone, Gaetana (ed.), ''Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies'', Volume 1, CRC Press, 2007. *Cella, Franca and Daolmi, Davide (eds.)
''La sensibilità sociale di Giuseppe e Giuseppina Verdi: dalle società di mutuo soccorso alla tutela dei musicisti d'oggi''
EDT srl, 2002. *Conati, Marcello
''Verdi: Interviste e incontri''
EDT srl, 2000. *Cretella, Chiara, Introduction to Boito, Camillo
''Storielle vane''
Edizioni Pendragon, 2007. *Goodman, Walter
Review: ''Il Bacio di Tosca'' (1984)
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'', 24 July 1985 *Lubrani, Mauro, ''Verdi a Montecatini'', Polistampa, 2001 *Phillips-Matz, Mary Jane
"Verdi's life, a thematic biography"
in Balthazar, Scott Leslie (ed.), '' The Cambridge Companion to Verdi'', Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 3–14. *Randel, Don Michael (ed.)
"Verdi, Giuseppe"
''The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music'', Harvard University Press, 1996, pp. 944–946. *Verdi, Giuseppe and Boito, Arrigo
''The Verdi-Boito correspondence''
(edited by Marcello Conati, Mario Medici and William Weaver, English translation by William Weaver), University of Chicago Press, 1994. *Savorra, Massimiliano, ''Boito e la Casa per musicisti: un testamento in pietra per lo stile nazionale'', Zucconi, Guido-Serena, Tiziana (a cura di), C''amillo Boito. Un protagonista'' ''dell’Ottocento italiano'', Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, Venezia 2002, pp. 167–191.

External links

{{Authority control Gothic Revival architecture in Italy Palaces in Milan Giuseppe Verdi 1896 establishments in Italy Tourist attractions in Milan