In 2006 UNESCO inscribed forty-two Genoese palaces and the streets they stand on into the world heritage list. It did not inscribe them for their beauty, which they certainly have: it inscribed them because together they document a model of urban organisation that exists nowhere else, and that worked for two centuries.
I wrote this article because the word “Rolli” turns up in every guide to Genoa and almost none of them explains what it was. If you think it is the name of an architect or of a family, you are in good company and you are wrong: it was a list, and the word comes from the rolls of paper the list was written on.
Careful: most of these palaces are private and cannot be visited. The exceptions are three of them (the Strada Nuova Museums) plus the days of extraordinary opening. The last section of the article explains which doors open and when.
What a Rollo actually was
How did a republic with no court manage to receive a king? Genoa had no royal palace because it had no king, but from the sixteenth century it was receiving ambassadors, cardinals and visiting sovereigns, and housing them badly was a diplomatic wound. The solution, adopted with a Senate decree of 1576, was to requisition the private houses of the patricians in turn.
The owners who agreed to join the list were entered in the “rolls of public lodgings”, divided into three categories according to how rich and how large the house was. The first category lodged popes, cardinals and reigning princes; the second governors and the great feudal lords; the third ambassadors and nobles of lesser rank. When a guest arrived, lots were drawn among the palaces of the right category.
The mechanism had a double advantage, and it is the reason UNESCO considers it unique. The state had to build nothing and maintain nothing. And the owner, who paid out of his own pocket, received prestige and connections in return: hosting a cardinal meant having his ear for weeks.
The result is that within a century the Genoese patriciate threw itself into a contest of magnificence funded by its own ambition, with the side effect of filling the city with grand staircases, courtyards, loggias and frescoes. This is architecture of display built to receive someone who might never arrive.
Strada Nuova, the first luxury development in Europe
The planning model that makes the Rolli a system and not a collection was born in 1550. The Republic decided to open a new street in an area on the edge of the medieval centre, where there were houses of ill repute and vegetable gardens, and to sell the plots to the richest families under binding rules: aligned facades, maximum height, an obligation of decorum towards the street.
It is what we would now call a zoning plan with aesthetic standards, and in the sixteenth century it had no precedent. The street, today via Garibaldi, is two hundred and fifty metres long and counts eleven palaces. Not one of them has ever been demolished, cut back or raised by a floor.
There is a detail you only notice by looking up: the painted facades. In Genoa mural painting replaced marble, which cost too much, and simulated cornices, columns and statues that are not there. On some palaces you can still make it out, on others it has almost vanished, but the original effect was an entire street of fake architecture painted onto real architecture.
The Rubens book, which is the reason we know them
Why did a twenty-eight-year-old Flemish painter set about drawing the plans and sections of other people’s houses? Pieter Paul Rubens arrived in Genoa in 1605 in the retinue of the Duke of Mantua, and the city struck him enough to make him measure the palaces with an architect’s eye.
In 1622, by then famous, he published in Antwerp the two volumes of the Palazzi di Genova: one hundred and thirty-nine engraved plates with plans, sections and elevations of some seventy buildings, with a preface explaining to his Flemish patrons that this kind of house (compact, vertical, without a farm courtyard) suited their climate and their cities better than the old Italian palace built around a court.
The book had the effect Rubens wanted: the Genoese type spread through northern Europe. And it has had an effect Rubens could not foresee, which is that we know today the original appearance of palaces that have been altered since, because his plates photograph them as they were in the early seventeenth century.
Which ones you can visit all year round
Three of the Rolli palaces are museums with regular opening hours, and all three stand on via Garibaldi.
Palazzo Rosso was the house of the Brignole Sale family and keeps their picture gallery where it belongs, with seven paintings by Van Dyck. Palazzo Bianco, almost opposite, holds Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo and the collection of Flemish painting. Palazzo Doria Tursi, which is the city hall, can be visited in its museum wing and guards Paganini’s violin.
A single ticket at 14 euros covers the three palaces plus the Museum of Sant’Agostino.
Also worth reading: The works to see in the Strada Nuova Museums, with the route room by room.
Away from via Garibaldi there is Villa del Principe, the home of Andrea Doria, which is not part of the Rolli system in the strict sense but is its model and comes before it. It opens every day.
Also worth reading: Villa del Principe, the house of Andrea Doria.
Some palaces house banks or public offices and show their entrance hall and staircase during working hours, with no ticket and no publicity: Palazzo Doria Spinola, today the seat of the Prefecture, and Palazzo della Meridiana are the most accessible. Do not expect museum routes, but the courtyard and the stair are often the best part.
The Rolli Days, the days when the city opens its houses
Since 2009 the city council has organised, two or three times a year, a weekend in which some forty palaces, many of them private, open free of charge with guided tours led by university students trained for the purpose. They are called Rolli Days and they are, without exaggeration, the only way into most of this heritage.
The autumn 2026 edition falls from 16 to 18 October and it is the one marking twenty years since the UNESCO inscription, so the programme is broader than usual. Entry is free but booking is compulsory and places run out fast: bookings normally open one or two weeks earlier on the official site rolliestradenuove.it.
If you are planning a trip to Genoa and you have some flexibility on the dates, this is the thing to be flexible about. The difference between seeing four palaces and seeing twenty is the difference between understanding the system and reading a description of it.
Practical information
Checked on 3 September 2026 on the official sites of the Musei di Genova and of rolliestradenuove.it. Prices, hours and the dates of the Rolli Days change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. The Strada Nuova Museums combined ticket costs 14 euros full price and it covers Palazzo Rosso, Palazzo Bianco, Palazzo Doria Tursi and the Museum of Sant’Agostino. The reduced ticket costs 9 euros and drops to 2 euros for young people between 18 and 25. The Rolli Days are free.
Opening hours. From 20 April to 30 September the three museum palaces open every day from 10 am to 7 pm, but on Monday only Palazzo Rosso opens. For the rest of the year they close on Monday. Last admission is one hour before closing.
Free entry. During the month of August entry to the Strada Nuova Museums is free for anyone over 65.
Getting there. Via Garibaldi is a quarter of an hour on foot from Genova Brignole station, or ten minutes from the Darsena metro stop. From Genova Piazza Principe bus 20 reaches piazza Fontane Marose, at the mouth of the street.
How long it takes. The three museum palaces take three hours. A walk along via Garibaldi with the facades alone asks half an hour. A Rolli Days weekend fills up easily with eight or ten palaces.
Where to go next
The best way to start is to walk into the three that are always open, and for those we have an article devoted to the works in the Strada Nuova Museums. If instead you are building a whole trip, the full picture with the two days is in What to see in Genoa in 2 days.
Photographs by Enric, Postcrosser, Ettorre and Sailko from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA licences. The plates of Rubens’s “Palazzi di Genova” are in the public domain.
