Palazzo Gerolamo Grimaldi

History and description

It was built between 1536 and 1544 by the Genoese banker Gerolamo Grimaldi Oliva, who had become rich in Portugal and Spain where he managed the collection of taxes in Cordoba and Granada. At the time of its construction it stood in an area of little urbanisation and considerable slope, with access and main façade on the salita di San Francesco di Castelletto, as well as two side elevations facing upstream and downstream gardens, much praised by the architect Joseph Fürttenbach. The frescoes on the north façade, still visible today, depicting the Labours of Hercules have been attributed to Aurelio Busso.

The fresco decoration of many interior rooms by Luca Cambiaso, Giovanni Battista Castello, Lazzaro Calvi and others was started between 1556 and 1566 under the commission of Gerolamo's son, Giovanni Battista Grimaldi, owner of the famous villa Grimaldi detta La Fortezza in Sampierdarena.

The 15th-century building, with its dual character of a decentralised city palace and a suburban villa residence, holds in its extraordinary ambiguity the secret genesis of an architectural renovation that few have so far clearly denounced in its ancestry. …