The Museum Vincenzo Vela

The Vincenzo Vela Museum is one of the most important artists' house-museums to have been erected in nineteenth-century Europe. Conceived by the great realist sculptor Vincenzo Vela from Ticino (1820-91) at the height of his career, and transformed into a public museum after it was donated to the Swiss state, in addition to Vincenzo Vela's gallery of monumental plaster casts it includes the bequests of the sculptor Lorenzo Vela (1812-97) and painter Spartaco Vela (1854-95), a remarkable collection of nineteenth-century Lombard and Piedmontese paintings, hundreds of autograph drawings and one of the earliest private collections of photographs in Switzerland.