Victory room

The building that hosts the large library is the only part of the house which Ugo Da Como completely new built.

Its architecture recalls a small sixteenth century Lombard church and it’s perfectly with the lines of the House of Podesta.

This first room on the ground floor is called the Victory room because it contains the scale down reproduction of the Winged Victory of Brescia, a very important Roman sculpture which can be admirable today in the Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia. The furnishing of this room has been particularly carefully planned: the lower part in fact was made from a seventeenth-century monastery choir, while the coffered ceiling recalls classical Renaissance ceilings. The fireplace is sixteenth century and on the both sides are engraved two mottoes in Latin which means respectively: "if you have a garden with a library you have everything you need" and "here the dead are live and in silent, they reveal oracles", a clear reference to the importance of books for transmit the knowledge.

Books are the favorites collected items of Ugo Da Como and he spent all of his energy completing his Library. On the oval table in a showcase it is possible to admire some micro-editions, including the famous "smallest book in the world", printed in 1897 in Padua, and containing a letter from Galileo Galilei to the Grand Duchess Christina of Lorraine. It is not the most important item in the Library, but it is certainly noteworthy a true collector's curiosity. It was made with movable type called "Dantino", because they was produced to print a small format of Divine Comedy and then used again for this special edition, which was printed with the specific purpose of gaining the title of the "smallest book in the world".