Milan owes less than Turin to the architectural activity of this period. The present decoration of the interior of the opera-house, La Scala, which was built by Giuseppe Piermarini (1734-1808) in 1776-8, dates from 1830 and is by Alessandro Sanquirico (1774-1849). This is quite similar in the sumptuousness of its white-and-gold ornamentation to Genovese’s later throne room at Caserta. The square gatehouses at the Porta Venezia, built in 1826 by Rodolfo Vantini (1791-1856), are boldly scaled and effectively paired. The Palazzo Rocca-Saporiti of 1812 by Giovanni Perego (1776-1817) in the Corso Venezia with its raised colonnade rivals in interest Cantoni’s better-known Palazzo Serbelloni of the 1790s near by. The much smaller and considerably later Palazzo Lucini of 1831 in the Via Monte di Pietà by Ferdinando Crivelli (1810-55) is so expert an example of High Renaissance design that it can readily be taken for real _cinquecento_ work. Paradoxically, such an extremely literate specimen of the Renaissance Revival is far less characteristic of Italy in the second quarter of the nineteenth century than of England or Germany. More typical of Italian taste in the thirties and forties are the buildings facing the flank of La Scala across the Via Verdi with their complex rhythm of fenestration and their very rich but still vaguely Grecian ornamentation. Eventually the Italians did, however, take up occasionally the Renaissance version of the international _Rundbogenstil_, and none too happily. For example, the Casa di Risparmio (known vulgarly as the Ca’ de Sass), built by Giuseppe Balzaretti (1801-74) in 1872 across the street from the refined and discreet Palazzo Lucini, is a stonier example of Tuscan rustication—as its nickname suggests—than was ever produced by the Northern Europeans who first revived the mode half a century earlier. A charming ornament to a smaller city is the Caffè Pedrocchi[70] in Padua of 1816-31 by Giuseppe Jappelli (1783-1852), a pupil of Selva, and Antonio Gradenigo (1806-84). Delicate in scale, interestingly varied in the handling of solids and voids, and most urbane in the discretion of its carefully placed ornamentation, this is certainly the handsomest nineteenth-century café in the world and about the finest Romantic Classical edifice in Italy (Plate 23A). Exceptional in this period in the Latin world is the Neo-Gothic wing known as Il Pedrocchino attached to the café, designed by Jappelli and for the same client; this was completed in 1837.