The rectangular Gallery with an area of around 500 square metres is situated inside the Credito Valtellinese headquarters in the Palazzo Stelline, so it is protected by the sophisticated security systems of one of Milan's most modern banks. It has volume-change and break-in alarm systems, professional security personnel, contact alarms for individual exhibits (which can also be placed in the bank's vault for safety), a closed-circuit TV surveillance system, fire-resistant oak parquet flooring, smoke detectors and fire spinklers. The Gallery has indirect lighting and climate is controlled with adjustable air-conditioning at constant 55-60% average humidity. At the main entrance there is a reception and bookshop area.
The home of the Credito Valtellinese Gallery is the eighteenth century Refectory - restored and refurbished in the 1980s as part of a wide-ranging renovation scheme financed by Credito Valtellinese itself in agreement with Milan's local government authorities - in the Palazzo Stelline, one of a group of buildings that have played a key role in the civic and cultural life of the city. The Gallery opened in 1987 with a major Andy Warhol exhibition on Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" specially devised for the new exhibition hall overlooking the vineyard which Ludovico il Moro gave to Leonardo as payment for his services to the Ducal Court of Milan. These services included his celebrated fresco of "The Last Supper" in the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie, only a short distance from the Palazzo Stelline which now houses the offices of prestigious Italian and international institutions like the European Union, ICE (Istituto Nazionale per Il Commercio Estero), Centre Culturel Français and the Mattei Foundation, as well as the headquarters and Gallery of Credito Valtellinese itself. Today the original vineyard is a pleasant garden known as "Leonardo's Orchard"; the Refectory which for centuries hosted an orphanage, one of the city's most celebrated charitable institutions, has now been converted into a splendid exhibition gallery; and the Cloister flanked by the gallery is now a sheltered, open-air space for exhibitions of contemporary sculpture.
The Andy Warhol exhibition that launched the Gallery was also the last creative act of the American artist, who died only a few months later. Since then, the Gallery's crowded programme of events has offered Milan important encounters with the work of leading twentieth-century artists.

These have included, in 1991, the most comprehensive survey of Georg Baselitz ever mounted in Italy (it later travelled to the Wesemburg Museum, Bremen); in 1992, the "Rodcenko: Graphic Artist, Designer, Photographer" exhibition, in 1993 "Polentransport 1981 " by Joseph Beuys with Muzeum Sztuki, Lodz (mounted previously in Tokyo and ubsequently in Lyon); and in 1995, a major Victor Brauner retrospective featuring important works lent by leading French museums.

    
However, the Gallery has always explored a wide variety of other artistic fields in design, graphics and architecture exhibitions mounted in collaboration with cultural institutions and museums throughout Europe. Photography has also featured widely, with exhibitions by masters like Roberto Capa in 1987, Henri Cartier-Bresson, who personally organised an important exhibition on American themes in 1992, Latin American photographer Martin Chambi and major Italian artists like Gianni Berengo Gardin, Gabriele Basilico and Aurelio Amendola, to name only a few.
The Credito Valtellinese Gallery is a non-profit institution. Admission is free. Wide-ranging collaboration with local bodies and foreign cultural institutions working in Milan, plus originality of conception and topical variety of themes, mean that exhibitions at the Credito Valtellinese Gallery are major local and regional events that attract national and often international media coverage.
What was once the Refectory of the Palazzo Stelline is now a fascinating example, unique in Milan and perhaps in the whole of Italy, of a gallery sponsored by a bank to full international museum standard with its own culturally rather than commercially oriented specialist staff: an important venue for professional critics and general visitors alike