Genoa: Guided Tour of the Rolli Palaces (UNESCO)

The tour departs from the Tourist Information Center at Via Garibaldi 12 (red number), in front of Palazzo Tursi — the grandest palazzo on the street, now Genoa's city hall. The guide opens with the history of Strada Nuova (Via Garibaldi's original name), the Senate's 1576 Rolli decree, and how the system of rotating noble hosts worked in practice. UNESCO inscribed it in 2006 as the world's only heritage listing for a system of private urban palaces rather than a single monument.

Built 1558–61 by Giovanni Battista Castello ('il Bergamasco') for the Pallavicino family, this palace is now known as Palazzo Carrega-Cataldi after later owners. Its interior centrepiece is the Galleria Dorata — the Golden Gallery — a Rococo salon of extraordinary extravagance, added in the eighteenth century with gilded stucco, frescoed ceiling, and mirrored walls. The contrast between the austere Renaissance exterior and the eruptive Rococo interior is deliberate and startling. The palace is the seat of the Genoa Chamber of Commerce and has no public admission — access is exclusively through guided visits like this one.

Also designed by Castello around 1560, Palazzo Imperiale was commissioned by the Imperiale family and has remained in their ownership continuously for over 450 years — one of the few great Genoese palaces still held by the founding dynasty. Its most celebrated feature is the cycle of frescoes by Luca Cambiaso, Genoa's foremost sixteenth-century painter, covering the piano nobile reception rooms with mythological scenes of unusual formal invention. Cambiaso's characteristic cubic figures and experimental foreshortening are at their most concentrated here. There is no public ticket or walk-up access.

Built in 1677 for the Brignole Sale family — one of Genoa's most powerful banking dynasties — Palazzo Rosso is the youngest of the four palaces and the only one with independent public access (it operates as a Strada Nuova Museum with its own ticket). Its collection is the richest of the Rolli palaces: Anthony van Dyck's portraits of the Brignole Sale family (including the famous equestrian portrait of Giovanni Francesco), Dürer's Calvary, Veronese, Guercino, and a sequence of period-furnished apartments whose painted ceilings were designed for specific rooms. The building's distinctive red-ochre facade gives it its name.

The last of the three Castello commissions (1563–69), Palazzo Lomellino conceals its most remarkable feature behind its facade: a hanging garden and Nymphaeum — a grotto-like water feature with stucco decoration — built on the hillside behind the palazzo, one of a very few surviving examples of this Renaissance garden type in a Genoese urban palace. Inside, a fresco cycle by Bernardo Strozzi was hidden beneath later whitewash for centuries and only rediscovered during twentieth-century restoration work. The restoration won a Europa Nostra Award. Like Palazzo Imperiale and Palazzo Tobia Pallavicino, there is no public admission outside guided tours.