The house of a thousand portraits

From May 2021 to April 2024, I had the privilege of photographing inside an abandoned Art Nouveau Liberty-style mansion built in 1884 — a wedding gift from a husband to his wife.
Located forty minutes from Milan, the villa became my refuge, my studio, and, in a way, a living character in my story.

Over the course of three years, I hosted nearly a hundred sessions there. Each time, the house revealed something new — a corner of forgotten beauty, a room I had never noticed, a shaft of light falling differently through the cracked glass.
The place never stopped whispering ideas.

The first portrait I took there became the seed of a legend: the ghost of a woman searching for her lost parrot. The story was born from truth — the original owner had taken her own life after one of her parrots escaped.
Perhaps that’s why the house always felt haunted.

What drew me in most were the windows.
Every session revolved around them: reflections, shadows, the soft diffusion of natural light. They became my dialogue with the house. When I left Milan, it was those windows I missed the most.

I often returned between shoots just to be there — trimming the grass, sweeping the floors, keeping the ghosts company.
I called it Villa delle Tre Torri, The Three Towers Villa, named after its two side towers and the central terrace rising above the main hall.

Every person who stepped through those doors reacted the same way — awe, silence, a smile that said “this place remembers”. The winter garden was always the favorite: vast glass walls, art nouveau ironwork, the last rays of sunset turning everything gold.

And then there was the chair — my quiet muse.
Something strange happened when clients sat in it: they stopped posing and began becoming.
That golden room, with its chair and the birdcage nearby, held hundreds of performances over the years — part séance, part play, part portrait session.

These images are fragments of that story — portraits taken in a house that seemed alive, one that always gave more than it took.
I call it The House of a Thousand Portraits because every person who entered left a trace, and the villa, in return, became part of them.