Giuseppe Mengoni Archive

The former town hall houses the Giuseppe Mengoni Archive, a museum dedicated to the renowned architect born in Fontanelice on 23 November, 1829.

Mengoni designed and supervised the construction of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. Funded by a generous donation from Carlo Basile, successor to the Fontana-born architect, the Archivio was inaugurated in 2002 following a period of painstaking inventorying and cataloguing of the material. The archive contains more than 1,700 design papers produced by Mengoni’s Milanese studio: the bulk of these are photographs, plans and written documents, all produced and used in the construction of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II which, together with its surrounding area, is still considered one of the world’s most beautiful buildings. This documentation ranges from the initial drawings for the tender issued by the Municipality of Milan in 1861 (for the ‘Configuration of Piazza del Duomo and adjacent streets’) to the executive drawings and the final details provided to various contractors as they worked on the gallery.