Palazzo Lomellino (Lomellino Palace), Genoa

Lomellino Palace dates back to the mid-16th century, and it wastes no time producing an impression. Built between 1559 and 1565 for Nicolosio Lomellino—a banker with family ties to Admiral Andrea Doria—it was designed by Giovan Battista Castello, working alongside Bernardo Cantone. The façade delivers its message before you step inside: an exuberant Mannerist composition wrapped in sculpted stucco, crowded with winged herms, theatrical masks, trophies, and looping garlands. This was architecture meant to be noticed and remembered.

The interior unfolds like a carefully planned sequence rather than a single grand reveal. You move from the entrance atrium into an oval courtyard that immediately breaks expectations, then upward into an airy nymphaeum—an 18th-century grotto-garden complete with fountain sculptures by Domenico Parodi. The palace rises in terraces, linking the street below with hanging gardens above, turning what could have been a tight urban plot into a surprisingly fluid, vertical experience.

Art plays a central role here, and not just as decoration. On the first "noble" floor, frescoes by Bernardo Strozzi re-emerged in 2002 after spending centuries hidden beneath layers of plaster. Their subjects—allegories of Faith and the New World—quietly reassert the palace’s original intellectual and symbolic ambitions. One floor higher, the tone changes, with mythological scenes by Marcantonio Franceschini, Giacomo Boni, and Domenico Parodi. Together, they reflect Genoa’s confident embrace of Baroque storytelling, filtered through local taste and restraint.

Despite its grandeur, the palace has never fully retreated into the past. Still privately owned, it opens its doors to visitors and regularly hosts cultural exhibitions that keep the space active and relevant. Its inclusion in the UNESCO-listed “New Streets and Palaces of the Rolli” underlines its broader importance—not just as a beautiful building, but as part of a larger urban idea. Lomellino Palace is less about a single wow moment and more about how carefully ambition, art, and architecture were choreographed—one space leading calmly, and deliberately, into the next.