After the success of the Modern & Contemporary Art auction held on 20 and 21 May 2015, which recorded the highest total ever (€19,681,075), Filippo Lotti, Managing Director of Sotheby's Italia, announces with satisfaction the move: “ We are proud to be able to give our Milanese business such a prestigious setting; the halls available for our upcoming international auctions and exhibitions are of great impact and suggestion”.
A new chapter therefore opens linking Sotheby's – the oldest auction house founded in London in 1744 and listed on the New York stock exchange (BID) – to the city of Milan: Palazzo Serbelloni – among the symbolic buildings in the history of the city – was one one of the first palaces to be built on Corso Venezia in the 1793th century and is characterized by a Neoclassical loggia, built in XNUMX.
Sotheby's inaugurated its operational base in Italy back in 1969 in Florence, and precisely in Palazzo Capponi, but as early as 1973, the city of Milan was chosen as the headquarters for Italy: first in via Monte Napoleone, then in via Mascagni and, since 1993, in Palazzo Broggi, in Via Broggi.
In over 47 years of Sotheby's activity in Italy, numerous historic auctions have been conducted.
The first Italian auction dates back to 1968, with the sale of the furnishings from the residence of Prince Paul Demidoff of Yugoslavia, followed by, among the most important events, that of the furnishings from the Capri residences of Countess Mona Bismarck (1987) and in 1994 the famous Corsini auction which tripled the estimate and had great resonance at national and international level,
In the 2000s – we recall – the auction of Italian and French furniture from the 2007th century, from the Alberto Bruni Tedeschi Collection (XNUMX) and the auction of the Collection of Jef Verheyen and Dani Franque, protagonists of the Zero Group, an artistic movement avant-garde that the Milan office has the merit of having been the first to offer to collectors from all over the world.
2008 is instead the year of the auction of the Collection, made up of more than 2.000 lots, which belonged to Maria Callas and is conserved by Giovanni Battista Meneghini, the soprano's husband and agent. The collection also included 63 love letters written by the "Divina" and many unpublished photographs of Maria on stage and in the company of friends such as Bernstein, Visconti, Zeffirelli, Pasolini and Toscanini. Milan on this occasion was the center of the international auction market, with buyers from every country.
