The Strada Nuova Museums are a single museum spread across three adjoining palaces on via Garibaldi, with one ticket for all of them. It is a formula that confuses people: you walk into Palazzo Rosso, come out satisfied, and never realise you are carrying the right to enter two more buildings fifty metres away, the ones that hold the Caravaggio and Paganini’s violin.
I put this route together to solve that problem. The works are listed palace by palace, not by importance, because that is how you actually walk them; but if you are short of time, here are the three you should not miss: Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo in Palazzo Bianco, the two pendant portraits by Van Dyck in Palazzo Rosso, and Paganini’s Cannone in Palazzo Tursi.
Watch out for Mondays. In the summer season the three palaces open every day, but on Monday only Palazzo Rosso opens. Going on a Monday means seeing a third of the museum with a full-price ticket.
Palazzo Rosso: the seven Van Dycks of a single family
Palazzo Rosso is the home of the Brignole Sale, a family that in the seventeenth century bought paintings the way people today buy shares, and its picture gallery still hangs in the rooms it was formed for. That is not a detail for historians alone: it means the portraits hang on the very wall that saw them arrive.
The two pieces to look for are the portrait of Anton Giulio Brignole Sale on horseback and the one of his wife Paolina Adorno, painted by Anthony van Dyck around 1627, during the painter’s stay in Genoa. They are a pair of pendant portraits, conceived to face each other, and this is one of the very few cases in which a pair of that kind was never split up by the art market: almost all the others now hang in two museums on two different continents.
Look at Paolina, not at her husband. Van Dyck sets her standing, in three-quarter view, in a black satin dress that takes up almost the whole canvas, and leaves her only one visible hand. It is a portrait built to intimidate, and it still works.
In the same rooms you will find Veronese’s Judith, Guercino’s Cleopatra, Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian and Bernardo Strozzi’s Cook, which is the most Genoese painting of them all: a woman plucking a bird at a table piled with game, with no allegory to decipher.
Palazzo Rosso: the two rooms of the seasons
On the main floor there are four frescoed rooms dedicated to the seasons, painted between 1687 and 1689 by Gregorio De Ferrari and Domenico Piola, the two painters who close the Genoese baroque. The vaults of Spring and Summer are by De Ferrari and they are the reason specialists come here: the fake architectural structure dissolves, the figures break through the ceiling and the light comes in from the sides as if the roof had been taken off.
There is also a reward that costs nothing. From the palace you climb, by a small staircase and a lift, to the roof terrace refurbished by Franco Albini in the 1960s: from up there you see the roofs of the old town and the harbour, and it is one of the few high views over Genoa you reach without a funicular.
Palazzo Bianco: Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo and the doubt that follows it
What happens when two museums display the same painting? Palazzo Bianco holds an Ecce Homo attributed to Caravaggio, oil on canvas measuring 128 by 103 centimetres, which entered the Genoese collections as a work by the master and was presented without reservations for decades.
In 2021 another version of the same subject resurfaced in Madrid, put up for auction as a minor work and then recognised as an autograph Caravaggio after the Spanish ministry stepped in and blocked its export. The rediscovery reopened the comparison, and the question is not settled today: part of the scholarship considers the Genoese canvas a workshop replica or a copy by another painter, part still defends it as autograph.
This article cannot settle it and will not pretend to. What can be said in front of it is that the framing is Caravaggesque through and through, with Christ pushed up against the picture plane and the torturer coming out of the dark, and that the museum displays it while stating the debate instead of hiding it. It is a case in which the history of the attribution is as interesting as the painting.
Palazzo Bianco: the Flemish paintings bought with money from the sea
Why is there so much northern painting in Genoa? Because Genoese bankers financed the Spanish crown, and Flanders was Spanish: paintings, tapestries and silverware travelled along the same routes as the money, often as payment in kind.
The oldest piece is Gerard David’s Cervara Polyptych, of 1506, painted in Antwerp for an abbey on the Ligurian coast. Then there is the Madonna della pappa by the same David, the Virgin with the milk soup, a domestic scene of unexpected tenderness, Van Dyck’s Vertumnus and Pomona and Rubens’s Allegory of Venus and Mars.
Among the Italians, look for the altarpiece by Filippino Lippi and the Viaticum of Saint Bonaventure by Zurbarán, who is Spanish but hangs here for the same reason as the others.
Palazzo Doria Tursi: the violin called the Cannone
Palazzo Tursi is Genoa’s town hall, and the museum section occupies a few rooms on the main floor. There is one reason to cross the courtyard: the Sala Paganiniana, which holds the violin Niccolò Paganini owned and played for almost his entire career.
It was built by Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri, known as del Gesù, in Cremona in 1743. Paganini called it «my cannon violin» for the power of its sound, and on his death he left it by will to the city of Genoa, on condition that it should never leave the place for good.
The city council does something almost no museum allows itself: it has the instrument played. A conservator luthier checks it regularly and a few concert players use it on public occasions, because a bowed instrument that does not vibrate for years deteriorates. In the same room there are the Vuillaume that Paganini gave to his pupil Camillo Sivori, autograph letters and scores.
The other rooms in Tursi hold the coins of the Republic, the silverware and the ceramics: civic museum material that you walk through in twenty minutes.
How to organise the visit in three hours
The most efficient order is not the geographical one. Start with Palazzo Bianco, which holds the works that ask for the most attention and are best seen with a fresh head; move on to Palazzo Tursi, which you reach directly from Bianco through an internal passage; close with Palazzo Rosso, which has the frescoed rooms and the terrace, that is, the things you enjoy even when you are tired.
Allow an hour and a half for Bianco, half an hour for Tursi, an hour for Rosso including the climb to the terrace.
Practical information
Data checked on 3 September 2026 on the official website of the Genoa museums. Prices and hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. The full ticket costs 14 euros and covers Palazzo Rosso, Palazzo Bianco, Palazzo Doria Tursi and the Museum of Sant’Agostino. The reduced ticket costs 9 euros. Visitors between 18 and 25 pay 2 euros. You buy the ticket online or at the ticket office in Palazzo Bianco.
Opening hours. From 20 April to 30 September the museums open every day from 10 am to 7 pm, with the warning that on Monday only Palazzo Rosso opens. For the rest of the year the weekly closing day is Monday. Last admission is one hour before closing. The fixed annual closure is 25 December.
Free admission. During the month of August visitors over 65 enter free.
Getting there. The entrance is on via Garibaldi. From Genova Brignole station you walk there in a quarter of an hour. The nearest metro stop is Darsena, ten minutes away. From Genova Piazza Principe bus 20 stops in piazza Fontane Marose.
How long it takes. Three hours for the three palaces. If you only have one hour, choose Palazzo Bianco.
Where to go from here
The three palaces you have just visited are three Rolli, and the system that produced them is told in the Rolli palaces in Genoa. The full two-day itinerary is in what to see in Genoa in 2 days.
If the Ecce Homo caught your interest, the painting makes more sense once you know the years in which it was painted: they are told in the life and style of Caravaggio.
Photographs and reproductions from Wikimedia Commons: works in the public domain, photographs by Sailko, Mongolo1984 and Carmelo Marino under a CC BY-SA licence.
