MUSEUMS

Royal Palace Museum

UNESCO World Heritage Site

The Royal Palace of Genoa is one of the most beautiful in Italy.

The Royal Palace has preserved its interiors intact, complete with original furniture and furnishings and top-quality works of art.

The collections of the residence-museum include the possessions of the noble families who built and lived in it, furnishing and renovating it over the centuries. The first owners, the Balbis, are responsible for the acquisition of masterpieces in the seventeenth century that are still present in the sumptuous rooms of the Gran Piano Nobile; the Durazzos, enlightened patrons who made the palace magnificent in the eighteenth century, are responsible for many transformations; the Savoy family is responsible for the last transformation into a royal palace, still fully legible today.

As rarely happens, the house passed from one patrician family to another, overcoming wars and epochal transformations, manages to revive the history of centuries. The large paintings with masterpieces by Veronese and Van Dyck, but also the furnishing elements with precious pieces of cabinetry, help to reconstruct the life of the ancient owners.

But not only that: the visit, today as in the past for those who undertook the Grand Tour, is also a journey into the history of the city and its wealth, presenting some evidence of how it has been transformed into beauty: the Hall of Mirrors tells of the infallible taste of the Genoese, of their cosmopolitanism, of the direct and intense relationships with the markets, residences and artists of the rest of Europe.

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National Galleries of Palazzo Spinola

UNESCO World Heritage Site

A palace located in the heart of the city's historic center, included in the Rolli system since the end of the sixteenth century. Palazzo Spinola, whose exhibition route leads the visitor to discover its luxurious seventeenth and eighteenth-century rooms, embellished with frescoes and furnishings, fabrics and oriental porcelain, is a succession of spaces in which a historic painting gallery among the most important in the city is still on display, the vision of which allows you to immerse yourself in that refined and precious atmosphere that characterized the taste of the nobility of the Superba. An itinerary enriched by the possibility of discovering unexpected environments, such as the historic nineteenth-century kitchens or the small but very elegant Galleria degli Specchi.

The two main floors – home to the Galleria Nazionale di Palazzo Spinola – preserve the extraordinary artistic heritage that has been stratified from generation to generation thanks to the careful patronage of the owners who, over the centuries, have followed one another. Thus we have a precious example of an aristocratic residential model in which the seventeenth-century aspect linked to the Grimaldis and Pallavicinos predominates on the first floor, while on the second the strong sign of the eighteenth-century renewal desired by Maddalena Doria Spinola.

The last two floors of the building house the National Gallery of Liguria with paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and furnishings that progressively increase the rich collections with donations or purchases by the Italian State.

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Diocesan Museum

Nestled between the Cathedral of San Lorenzo and the Palazzo Ducale, the Diocesan Museum is one of the heart of Genoa. In a secondary street compared to the usual routes - via Tommaso Reggio - entering the Museum, you discover an unexpected and surprising building and works of art: a medieval cloister full of frescoes and built on an ancient Roman domus and a heritage of paintings and sculptures, fabrics, illuminated manuscripts, silver, reliquaries, musical instruments and an initial archaeological section, to tell the artistic history of the city.

The building that houses the museum has a complex and articulated structure, the result of numerous interventions that have taken place over time: erected as a residence for the Canons of the Cathedral in the second half of the 12th century, in an area that had already been settled in Roman times, it sums up and leaves visible interventions from subsequent centuries, giving us an extremely interesting architectural artefact, a reason to visit in itself.

The museum itinerary follows a chronological order on four floors, interspersed with themed rooms, among which, unique in the world, is the one with the 16th-century Passion Cloths on denim fabric.

The collection of the Diocesan Museum is composed mostly of works from churches in the diocese: only a small part has come through donations or belongs to the Museum, which is therefore responsible for its conservation, protection and valorization.

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Porta Soprana and Columbus' House

Close to one of the areas of the modern city centre, near Piazza Dante, there is a medieval island of particular charm.

Walking up the short bricked slope of the historic Vico Dritto di Ponticello means crossing a space full of monuments, a sort of short walk through the history of Genoa. Certainly the urban renovation works that followed one another in the area during the first decades of the last century have distorted its appearance, but for us it remains a sort of "condensation" that is completely evocative.

Between the Middle Ages and the discovery of the Americas, one can almost touch with one's hands one of the most fertile and fascinating periods of the city's history and art.

At the top of the hill stands the austere Porta Soprana, access to the medieval city from the East, built by the Genoese between 1155 and 1158, not far from the House of Christopher Columbus.

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Galata Sea Museum

A few steps from the Genoa Aquarium, the Galata was born in the late 90s of the last century from a courageous historical and environmental redevelopment project of the area of the ancient Darsena and the remains of the Arsenale della Repubblica: a context still visible today that gives great charm to the entire area.

The tour route winds through a museum section, in the main building, and an open-air section where the archaeological-port park is located, which forms the museum's waterfront and where the Nazario Sauro submarine is moored, the only one in Italy that can be visited at sea.

In the internal rooms, the visitor passes through environments with a scenographic layout that create a suggestive context to appreciate the precious objects of the collections: paintings, medieval nautical charts, atlases, on-board instruments, models, etc. They thus come to life, inviting the visitor to take a real journey to discover the history and imagination of the sea.

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Fantasy Cinema

Fantacinema is a very special museum-exhibition, unique in its genre, which allows you to immerse yourself in a sort of dream that excites adults and children alike.

Inside it there are important private collections made available to the public.

The Pittaluga collection contains magic lanterns, very rare projection slides and early filming and projection instruments.

The Cineciak collection consists of objects, fiberglass sculptures, original film costumes, posters, scene photos from the 1920s (Nosferatu, Dracula, King Kong) to today (Star Wars, Batman, Harry Potter).

Thematic exhibitions are periodically set up in the 40-seat meeting room.

There is also a rich offer of rare and unobtainable gadgets dedicated to fantasy cinema.

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Genoa Lantern Museum

The Lanterna of Genoa is the symbolic monument of the city, the tallest lighthouse in the Mediterranean, the second in Europe.

Over the centuries it has been a signal tower and an armed guard, a stage for tightrope walkers and a prison. Its current form dates back to 1543 when it was rebuilt after the destruction of the old lighthouse in 1514.

In 1626, the first stone of the approximately 20 km long city wall was laid at the Lanterna, which was completed in 1639, thus becoming the longest city wall in Europe and second in the world, in length, only to the Great Wall of China.

The rock on which it stands is 40 meters high, the tower 77 meters, its summit is therefore 117 meters above sea level. Its rotating optics projects light up to 57 km away. The steps to climb to reach the first terrace (the only one that can be visited) are 172.

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D'Albertis Castle Museum Residence

This unusual museum-home, housed in a neo-Gothic castle, offers the extraordinary opportunity to enter the home of Captain Enrico Alberto D'Albertis, its creator, who donated it to the city upon his death in 1932.

Travelling by sea and land between the 19th and 20th centuries, he enclosed his world in a romantic setting, between “chambers of wonders”, maritime suggestions, Colombian evocations and colonial trophies. His castle, as documented by the construction drawings, bears witness to the fascination of distant worlds on his spirit, imbued with “Genoese-ness” and love for the sea and an equal curiosity towards the unknown and the untried.

The museum's collections, presented in a succession of rooms furnished "in style" and characterised by the taste of the "revival", are made up of ethnographic and archaeological material collected in five continents by the Captain, to which are added those of his cousin Luigi Maria, the first explorer of the Fly River in New Guinea (1872-1878).

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Giacomo Doria Natural History Museum

Founded in 1867, the Natural History Museum is the oldest in the city and has very rich scientific collections consisting of 4.5 million finds and specimens from all over the world: animals, fossils, plants and minerals. There are 6,000 exhibits, distributed in 23 rooms on two floors. The ten rooms on the ground floor host the exhibition of all the orders of mammals. The two central rooms, particularly scenic, are dedicated to paleontology and temporary exhibitions. On the first floor, there are six rooms dedicated to other vertebrates: birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish. Two rooms are reserved for insects and other invertebrates. The cell room hosts the three-dimensional reconstruction of a cell magnified 100,000 times. The last section of the museum is dedicated to minerals.

The rich tour itinerary is in all respects a journey into the planet's biodiversity and is particularly attractive for children, teenagers, families and all nature lovers.

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Museum of the Treasure of San Lorenzo

It is housed in the crypt of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo. The reinterpretation of the spaces carried out by the architectural intervention of Franco Albini in 1956 makes the Treasure of the Cathedral of Genoa a famous example of modern museography. The space, of great suggestion, offers itself as a true treasure chest of goldsmith's and silversmith's works from the medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods.

The objects can be divided into three types: relics and their containers, or reliquaries; objects and works connected to the veneration of St. John the Baptist, proclaimed patron saint of Genoa in 1327; and liturgical furnishings made or donated to the cathedral over the centuries and used for the most important religious celebrations. Among the most famous pieces is the so-called Sacro Catino, shrouded in mystery and legend: tradition holds that it coincides with the Holy Grail, the plate used by Jesus Christ during the Last Supper. It was thought that the green glass was actually a very precious emerald!

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The Mazzinian Risorgimento Museum

Inaugurated on 5 May 1915 in Palazzo Bianco, since 1934 it has been located in the birthplace of Giuseppe Mazzini.

It preserves and exhibits a rich historical and artistic heritage through which the symbolic figures of the Risorgimento come to life again: Giuseppe Mazzini and the republican and democratic movement; Giuseppe Garibaldi and the Red Shirts; Goffredo Mameli and the Italian Anthem.

The exhibition itinerary retraces the historical events that led to the unification of Italy, from the anti-Austrian revolt in Genoa in 1746 to the inauguration of the Monument to the Thousand of Quarto in 1915.

The considerable historical, artistic and documentary heritage preserved in the institute has been formed through donations and purchases since the 19th century. Paintings, prints, posters, sculptures, documents, photographs, uniforms, weapons, flags and relics cover a time span that goes beyond the strict chronology of the Risorgimento, and from the 18th century up to the Second World War and the Liberation.

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Viadelcampo29rosso

In the heart of the old city, in the street of the same name sung by Fabrizio De André, where the historic shop “Musica Gianni Tassio” was located, is Viadelcampo29rosso, the emporium-museum dedicated to the singer-songwriters of the “Genoese school”:

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The small museum houses original vinyl records, photographs and memorabilia such as the Esteve '97 guitar that belonged to Faber.

Dedicated to the singer-songwriter, the site's mission is to preserve its artistic heritage and to care for the relationship between the city and music: it organizes events, thematic itineraries in the area, showcases, workshops for schools, and is available as a television set, known and appreciated in Italy and abroad.

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