Villa del Principe

This Renaissance Villa del Principe was built for Andrea Doria, the great admiral of Charles V, at the beginning of the 16th century. The villa, built in the area of Fassolo, just outside the city walls to the west, was seat of the only true “court” of the Genoese Republic.

It is still the property of his descendants who have decided to use the monumental parts as a museum. The visit, through a succession of richly decorated and furnished rooms, allows you to relive the glories of both the Doria family and of the Republic itself.

The large sixteenth-century building is surrounded by a large scenic Italian garden overlooking the sea which once directly connected to the port.

The museum's rooms hold wonderful works of art, resulting from commissions by members of the family who lived for centuries in this superb 16th-century Villa.

Andrea Doria established a kind of Renaissance court which included such first-rate artists as Girolamo da Treviso, il Beccafumi, Silvio Corsini. To Perin del Vaga, a pupil of Raffaello and a leading figure of the art scene in Rome in the years preceding the Sack of Rome (1527), was commissioned the decoration of some interiors.

Andrea's heir, Giovanni Andrea I Doria, added new works of art to the Palazzo, which was extended to twice its original size. The Villa was subsequently home for nearly five centuries to successive generations of the Doria Pamphilj family, who amassed paintings, tapestries and fine furniture within its splendid sixteenth-century rooms.

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The masterpieces preserved at the Villa del Principe include both works of art and the buildings interior and exterior decoration.

Among the interior decoration are frescoes by Perin del Vaga, pupil of Raffaello, which represent one of the most important cycles of Renaissance painting in northern Italy, including his masterpiece the Fall of the Giants.

The beautiful Italian garden is dominated by the monumental Fountain of Neptune, work of the great Florentine Renaissance sculptor Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli.

Among the works on display, the Portrait of Andrea Doria painted by Sebastiano del Piombo and many tapestries, which include two exceptional 15th-century works featuring Stories of Alexander the Great and the series of the Battle of Lepanto.

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Royal Palace Museum

Genoa’s Royal Palace is one of the most beautiful buildings in Italy. An extraordinary construction which has preserved its interiors intact, complete with original furniture, superb furnishings, the finest works of art.

The collections of the  house-museum includes reminders of the noble families who built and lived there, furnishing and renovating it over the centuries. The original owners, the Balbi, were responsible for the acquisition of seventeenth-century masterpieces which are still present in the sumptuous rooms of the Grand Piano Nobile; many subsequent developments are thanks to the Durazzo, enlightened patrons who rendered the palace magnificent in the eighteenth century; while the final changes by which it became a royal palace is due to the Savoia, the history of the transformation of the building is still fully legible today.

As rarely happens, the residence passed from one patrician family to another, surviving wars and, managing to preserve centuries of history. The great paintings including masterpieces by Veronese and Van Dyck, but also the furnishings with precious pieces of cabinetry, bear witness to the lives of its ancient owners.

But not only: the visit, today as in the past for those embarked on the Grand Tour, is also a journey into the history of the city and its wealth, presenting proof of how it was transformed into beauty: the Gallery of Mirrors tells of the infallible taste of the Genoese, of their cosmopolitanism, of the close and intense relationships with markets, residences and artists from the rest of Europe.

The visit to the interiors - with its collections of sculptures, paintings, marbles and precious fabrics, gilded wood and crystal chandeliers - and of the exteriors - the hanging garden and terraces - the visitor lives both grand or more intimate atmospheres and enjoys unforgettable views of the port.

 

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Paintings, sculptures, tapestries and precious furnishings including furniture, porcelain and silver, accompany the visitor as they discover the magnificence of one of the most significant and emblematic buildings of the city. Among the great names, for paintings, those of Veronese, Tintoretto, Rubens , Van Dyck and Luca Giordano; for sculpture Filippo Parodi and Francesco Maria Schiaffino.

In addition to the works, the decoration of the rooms deserves special attention: from the vaults frescoed by Genoese baroque masters ranging from Valerio Castello and Giovanni Battista Carlone, to the opulence of the following century, from the scenography of the Galleria degli Specchi to the frescoes by Domenico Parodi.

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Composizione n. 3

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Musei di Genova Contemporary Art Museum of Villa Croce

 

 

 

Avviso

Il Museo di Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce rimane chiuso al pubblico, a partire da venerdì 3 gennaio 2025 e fino a data da destinarsi,  per consentire la realizzazione dei lavori relativi alla rimozione delle barriere fisiche nell'ambito di un progetto finanziato con fondi del PNRR.

Contemporary Art Museum of Villa Croce

In the beautiful setting of this 19th-century villa, surrounded by a large park in the residential district of Carignano and overlooking the sea, sits Contemporary Art Museum Villa Croce. When it was inaugurated on February 2, 1985, it was the second most important museum of its kind in Italy and it immediately became a reference point for contemporary art in Genoa.

The museum's collections consist of over 4,000 works - paintings, drawings, sculptures - which document modern and contemporary art from the 1930s onwards. Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Bruno Munari, Osvaldo Licini, Ben Vautier are just some of the leading figures present in the collection. The collection is largely held in storage and displayed periodically as part of the Museum’s exhibition programmes.

The collections are constantly evolving thanks to numerous donations and acquisitions.

The museum presents an important annual program of exhibitions and events that keep the museum alive and in touch with the contemporary, national and international art world, offering food for thought and comparisons with some of the protagonists of art in Liguria.

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The museum's rich collection consists of over 4,000 works.

The original core of the collection comes from the collection of Maria Cernuschi, with 200 works that testify to the Italian abstract movement and includes protagonists such as Osvaldo Licini, the experiments of Lucio Fontana and Bruno Munari, the optical-perceptive and preconceptual research, documented with an important "Achrome" by Piero Manzoni and the experimentation of artists such as Paolo Icaro. The same trends can also be found elsewhere in the collection such as the LAB (Laboratorio della Bassa Lunigiana) donated in 2001, with extraordinary works such as the large sculpture "Nature wounded" by Gunther Uecker.

Since the end of the 1980s, this patrimony has been enriched thanks to gallery owners and artists who have been protagonists of the most important Ligurian artistic efforts from the second post-war period to today. The most recent acquisitions mainly concerned contemporary works coming from dedicated projects created specifically for the museum spaces such as the wall drawing by Ben Vautier or the interventions by Flavio Favelli and Plamen Dejanoff in the room with a fireplace on the ground floor, which demonstrates the close relationship between museum and artists, an aspect which is central to the activity carried out at Villa Croce.

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Musei di Genova Museum of the Genoa Cricket and Football Club

 

 

 

Museum of the Genoa Cricket and Football Club

The Genoa Museum is dedicated to the history of Genoa Cricket and Football Club, the oldest in Italy. The museum was inaugurated on 5th June 2009 by the Genoa 1893 Foundation and was first based in the headquarters of the historic Genoese newspaper "Il Lavoro", directed by Sandro Pertini, and, since 2013, in the 16th-century building of San Giobatta, in the setting of the Porto Antico, which in addition to the rooms of the museum also houses a covered garden.

A thematic and chronological path, which combines sport, culture and society. Interactive and multimedia solutions offer a whirlwind of emotions, including over 500 memorabilia, trophies, documents and photographs, through two centuries of history.

The Genoa Museum has among its objectives the increase, care and enhancement of the historical and cultural heritage of the oldest club in Italy. This initiative has filled some gaps in the past, such as the dispersion of historically important documents and materials. For this reason, a work of research, retrieval and acquisition of objects, relics and videos that have been lost over time was carried out, to restore them and make them accessible to the public.

 

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The museum of Genoa is a fascinating place, with one of the most important collections in the panorama of Italian football.

The history of Genoa Cricket and Football Club is a universe of memory that through photographs, documents, films and direct testimonies, continues to passionately tell his story and the history of Italian football.

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Antonio Semino, Deposizione dalla Croce

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Musei di Genova Pegli Maritime Museum - Villa Doria Centurione

Villa Centurione Doria, home of the Maritime Museum of Pegli for several years, is currently closed. The Museum, however, is alive: we are working to make it a secure place and to plan new activities to be shared with visitors in sight of a future reopening. Thanks to an agreement with the CUP (Centro Universitario Ponente) it is possible, for members and citizens (by reservation), to carry out occasional public or private events.

Villa Centurione Doria, home of the Maritime Museum of Pegli for several years, is currently closed. The Museum, however, is alive: we are working to make it a secure place and to plan new activities to be shared with visitors in sight of a future reopening. Thanks to an agreement with the CUP (Centro Universitario Ponente) it is possible, for members and citizens (by reservation), to carry out occasional public or private events.

Villa Centurione Doria - Pegli Maritime Museum

Villa Centurione Doria hosted for several years the Maritime Museum of Pegli; currently is closed to the public, because we are working to make itself a secure place and to plan new activities to be shared with visitors in sight of a future reopening. 


The Renaissance villa was built, in successive stages starting from the beginning of the sixteenth century, in a charming place which was and still is Pegli (a beautiful neighborhood of Genoa). The buyer of the villa was Adamo Centurione Oltremarino, merchant and wealthy financier of the sixteenth-century, a great friend and adviser of the famous admiral Andrea Doria.

Visitors can admire precious maps, paintings, drawings, ship models, construction and navigation tools, and “visit” the old shipyards and workshops of the maritime world. Of great significance are the stories of work culture of Ligurian sailors and shipwrights.

In recent years, the museum has established itself as a veritable cultural arena for the west of Genoa, a meeting place for Associations offering a rich program of art exhibitions, as well as cultural and social events.


The villa is part of the Mu.MA Maritime and Migration Museums, together with the Galata Maritime Museum, the Museum of the lighthouse “La Lanterna” and the Commenda di Prè that house the new MEI – National Museum of Italian Migration.

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In 1922, one of the most important naval designers in the country, the engineer Fabio Garelli, donated his private collection to the Municipality of Genoa, made up of a rich collection of models, watercolors, engravings, drawings and books.

Many other bequests have been added to the Garelli donation, among which that of the Librarian of the shipowner Gio. Batta Bibolini particularly stands out.

It is from these two collections that many of the most significant works of the museum come.

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Musei di Genova Castello D'Albertis - Museum of World Cultures

Castello D'Albertis - Museum of World Cultures

This unique house-museum offers an extraordinary opportunity to immerse oneself in the world of its creator, the Captain Enrico Alberto D’Albertis, who generously gifted it to the City of Genoa upon his death in 1932. Through his adventures across land and sea between the 19th and the 20th centuries, the Captain gathered stories and artefacts and brought them back to be housed in this romantic frame inspired by ‘curiosity cabinets’ and the colonial trophies commonly collected at the time. As documented by numerous construction drawings, the castle itself, built in the neo-gothic style, encapsulates the Captain’s deep love for the sea, his curiosity for the unknown and the unexplored, his fascination for the unfamiliar worlds he visited and, underneath it all, his deeply Genoese soul.

The museum’s collections, presented in a sequence of evocative alcoves furnished according to the “revival” style of the time, are composed of ethnographic and archaeological materials gathered by the Captain across five continents; to these are added those collected by the Captain’s cousin Luigi Maria, the first to explore the Fly river in New Guinea (1872-1878).

Entering the 16th-century bastion on which the castle stands, visitors can follow a route that takes them through further extra-European collections acquired by the city in the last century, including archaeological materials from Central and South America and ethnographic materials from Canada donated by the US Catholic Mission Association following the exposition for the Columbian celebrations of 1892. All these materials, displayed with a thoughtful, contemporary exhibition design, have been revisited and contextualised through a dialogue with their source communities.

 

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The Captain gathered extensive testimonies and materials from populations all over the world to form ethnographic and archaeological, nautical and photographic collections that join his extensive assortment of sundials.

The presence of neo-gothic design elements, rich with the influence of the Hispano-Moorish and “oriental” styles popular at the time, finds its pinnacle where hundreds of pieces (furnishings, pendants, arms, vases, couches, hookahs, lamps, and ostrich eggs, to name a few) peep out from under the curtained ceiling, all to create the effect of being in an “exotic” tent.

The Oceanic materials gathered by the Captain in Australia, Melanesia, and the Polynesian islands are joined by the important Mesoamerican (Aztec, Teotihuacan, Costa Rica) archaeological collections and by pieces from the Hopi tribe of Arizona. African weaponry from Sudan and Zambia, Chinese lances, and European halberds have been replaced in their original position, where they decorate the stairway joining the ground floor to the first floor.

Among the materials donated to the city during the Columbian celebrations of 1892, the artefacts from indigenous peoples of the Plains (US and Canada), clay and textile grave goods from pre-Hispanic South American civilisations, and Mayan fragments in volcanic tuff from the acropolis of Copán in Honduras are of particular anthropological importance.

The museum is also home to the Captain’s library and all its volumes, which include Ethiopian manuscripts in the Ge’ez language and works on Ceylon paper made from palm leaves.

 

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Musei di Genova Ligurian Archaeological Museum

Ligurian Archeological Museum

The Museum is located in Pegli, an important residential area to the west of the City, it is set in the extraordinary complex of aristocratic house (Villa Durazzo Pallavicini which houses the collection), park and Museums. The ancient Villa was donated to the Municipality of Genoa in 1928 by the heirs of the Pallavicini on condition that it be used for cultural purposes. Thus, was born the most important archaeological museum in Liguria, inaugurated in 1936.

In addition to the many historical exhibits and those added in the distant past, other more recent finds have been added to ensure that a visit is a stimulating and informative experience.

With over 50,000 archaeological finds coming from all over Liguria, the museum recounts the events and the climatic, environmental, economic and technological changes of over a hundred thousand years, from prehistoric to ancient times.

The visitor encounters extraordinary and unique remains and artefacts, such as those from Paleolithic burials, the rich grave goods of the necropolis of Genoa, the famous "Table of Polcevera", testimony that has survived and that make up the fascinating history of a region, which has always been a cross roads and meeting place of peoples, cultures and ideas between Europe and the Mediterranean.

 

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Among the 50,000 finds preserved in the historic museum, it is possible to select ten that testify to the most significant events in Ligurian history: from the great climatic changes of the Paleolithic age, to the origins of Genoa, the rise of Rome as Caput Mundi and the foundation of the first Roman cities in Liguria.

They come not only from archaeological digs, but also from private collections, among which Prince Odone of Savoy‘s (from the nineteenth-century) stands out, it also provides an insight into this period of cultured and refined collecting.

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Musei di Genova Strada Nuova Museums

Strada Nuova Museums

Unesco World Heritage

In the extraordinary setting of Via Garibaldi, the magnificent Renaissance and Baroque 'Strada Nuova’, designed in the mid-16th century and site of the homes of many of the city’s rich and powerful aristocracy, this unique museum itinerary connects three palaces in order to present the most important museum of antique art in the city.

Palazzo Rosso is a "house” museum where the charm of the seventeenth-century residence is preserved through the rich art collections and historical furnishings of the Brignole-Sale family in rooms sumptuously decorated with frescoes and stuccos.

Palazzo Bianco is the main art gallery of the region, offering a rich and varied cross-section of the Ligurian school of painting from the sixteenth century, along with exceptional Flemish, Spanish and Italian works. The link between Palazzo Bianco and Palazzo Tursi crosses the site where the church of the (now demolished) monastery of San Francesco di Castelletto once stood, remnants of which can be seen in a suggestive and absolutely unique context.

Palazzo Doria-Tursi, which today also houses the Town Hall, was intended to be the most grandiose private residence built in the city in the so-called “Century of the Genoese”. Here the exhibition dedicated to 18th century painting ends and the visitor finds a rich selection of decorative and applied art: tapestries, Genoese ceramics, coins, weights and official measures from the ancient Republic of Genoa. It is here that the historic violins of Nicolò Paganini are kept, including the famous "Cannone".

The visit to the Strada Nuova Museums consists of over seventy-five rooms, it unfolds on various levels including courtyards, loggias, gardens and terraces up to the "miradore" of Palazzo Rosso and is interspersed with breathtaking views over the city and its historic centre.

Discover the works currently on loan

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The Strada Nuova Museums preserve paintings, sculptures and applied arts from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The amazing picture gallery of the Brignole-Sale family, in the frescoed rooms of Palazzo Rosso and the rich picture gallery of Palazzo Bianco, house masterpieces of Venetian Renaissance painting, from Palma il Vecchio to Veronese, early 17th century Italian painting, from Caravaggio to Guido Reni and Guercino, in addition to the most complete exhibition in Liguria of Nordic painting of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and a precious selection of portraits by Anton van Dyck. The setting is the result of a masterful museographic intervention by the mid-twentieth century architect Franco Albini. Not to be missed, in Palazzo Doria-Tursi dedicated to Nicolò Paganini including his most famous violin: the “Guarnieri del Gesù”.

 

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