The palace was the main seat of the administration of justice in Milan for about three centuries, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth, during the Spanish and Austrian domination. The Captain of Justice was, in fact, since the Middle Ages, the figure who supervised public order in the city.
The building was deliberate in the seventies of the sixteenth century, under the inspiration of the Spanish Governor Don Gabriel de la Cueva y Girón Duke of Albuquerque, and the Archbishop Carlo Borromeo, who also provided the initial funds for construction. The project was committed to the architect Pietro Antonio Milan Barca (it is is the first known work). The palace was also called "the new prisons," as into it also the prisoners were jailed . At the north wing, now on Piazza Beccaria, there were the home of the Executioner and the place where the executions took place. For this reason, in fact, the square was dedicated in the nineteenth century to promoter the abolition of the death penalty, Cesare Beccaria.

Beccaria home (also known as Palazzo Beccaria home ) is a palace in Milan, rebuilt in the nineteenth century in Neoclassical style. Historically belonged to the district of Porta Comasina, and it is located in Via Brera 6
The building, which already existed in the eighteenth century, owes its present appearance to a subsequent rearrangement in neo-classical style, brought to completion in the first half of the nineteenth century by the architect Gaetano Faroni. He, in addition to the completely covering of the the facade with ashlar smooth, enriched it with some medallions depicting various figures, including Cesare Beccaria and Gaetana Agnesi.
It was in this house that in fact Cesare Beccaria was born in 1738; always in this house in 1761 there was the birth of his daughter Julia, the future mother of Alessandro Manzoni. Here Cesare Beccaria wrote most of his works, and always here he died in 1794.