This room is the first visitors encounter in the suite of Giuseppe Bagatti Valsecchi and his wife, Carolina Borromeo. It was used as a sitting room, and owes its name to the wooden wall paneling once gracing a room with a heating stove in a centuries-old house in Sondrio. Above the room’s fireplace, an inscription in Latin paraphrasing St. Augustine warns those present against taking advantage of sitting in front of the fire to indulge in gossip: ‘he who speaks badly of those not present, may he know that this fireside is forbidden to him’.