Baburizza Palace

The palace facade, entrance, and first-floor windows remain from the private residence on Cerro Alegre, while its rooms now house the city museum of fine arts. In nineteen seventy-one, the municipality bought the house from the former owner's heirs in order to bring together under one roof the paintings that had changed addresses for almost thirty years. The lower rooms contain paintings from the European collection, and one floor above are works by Chilean artists, including views of Valparaíso. This is how a private house became the permanent home of the city collection.

The palace bears the surname of a man who did not build it. In nineteen sixteen, this house was commissioned by Ottorino Zanelli, an Italian food merchant who had moved to Valparaíso from northern Chile. He intended the new residence for his family. After Zanelli's death, his widow Margarita Morales was left with the children and sold the house in nineteen twenty-five.

Pascual Baburizza became the buyer. He began in Iquique as a seventeen-year-old Croatian emigrant, supplying nitrate operations with goods and provisions. He then acquired his own trading, mining, banking, and agricultural companies. It was this capital that enabled him to buy the residence on Cerro Alegre and bring back paintings from trips to Europe. Gradually, dozens of landscapes, portraits, and genre scenes gathered in these rooms.

Baburizza was not married and had no children. In his will, he ordered that his European collection be given to Valparaíso. After his death in nineteen forty-one, more than seventy paintings became part of the city's collection and helped reopen the Valparaíso Municipal Museum of Fine Arts.

The house was not included in the will. It remained with Baburizza's relatives, while the museum with the donated paintings moved from one premises to another for almost thirty years. Only in nineteen seventy-one did the municipality buy the residence from the heirs and place the city collection here. Baburizza's paintings returned to the rooms where they had previously belonged to a single owner, but visitors to the museum could now access them.

The European collection still occupies the first floor. Chilean works and paintings about Valparaíso are displayed above. Zanelli built the house, the municipality established the museum, and the surname above the entrance was left by its second owner—the man who gave the city the paintings, but not the palace itself.