The Palazzo Carmagnola, also called the Palazzo di Broletto, at the corner of Via Rovello and Via Dante, is the oldest of these palaces, and is also of historic interest. Duke Filippo Maria gave a house here, in 1418, to his great general, Carmagnola, who rebuilt it a few years later. The house passed through one of his daughters to the Dal Verme family, and was confiscated in 1485 by Lodovico Sforza, who installed his mistress, Cecilia Gallerani in it later. The historian Giorgio Merula, one of the ornaments of the Moro’s court, also inhabited it for some years. When Louis XII. made himself master of Milan, he gave the palace to his general, Charles d’Amboise, and later on it came into the possession of the city, and was used for public offices, whence it acquired the name of Palazzo di Broletto. It is now the Intendenza di Finanza. The building has little of its old aspect left, but there is a picturesque cortile of the late fifteenth century, with graceful and characteristic sculptured capitals, part of a probable restoration of the palace by the Moro, to make it a habitation worthy of his beautiful favourite. A beautiful late Quattrocento palace is the Casa Fontana, or Silvestri, in the Corso Venezia, which has a noble portal of classic form, supported on columns in the form of candelabra, and windows enframed in terra-cotta ornamentation. The façade is, moreover, painted in chiaroscuro, with designs of the typical style of Lombard Renaissance decoration—colossal heads and sporting _putti_, etc. It has been attributed to Bramante, but is more probably the work of local architects. The cortile is very picturesque.