Genoa is the Italian art city that has the hardest time letting itself be visited, and it is not its own fault. Its main heritage, the forty-two Rolli palaces inscribed on the UNESCO list in 2006, is made up largely of private buildings: banks, offices, apartment blocks, law courts. People live in them. A tourist who turns up in Genoa holding the list of the Rolli and tries ringing the doorbells goes home with four photographs of closed front doors.
I wrote this itinerary starting from there, that is from what you can actually walk into on any ordinary weekend. It is two full days, built on five stops that open all year round and that together tell one single story: how a republic of merchants bought, in a century and a half, the best of European painting.
Warning: most of the Rolli palaces cannot be visited. The exceptions are the three that house the Strada Nuova Museums (Palazzo Rosso, Palazzo Bianco and Palazzo Doria Tursi) and the days of the Rolli Days, when some forty buildings open to the public free of charge. The autumn 2026 edition falls on 16 to 18 October and is the one marking twenty years of the UNESCO listing: if you can make your trip coincide with those dates, the number of open doors triples.
First of all: the calendar decides the order, not the map
Why can these two days not simply be swapped around? Because in Genoa the closing days fall on different days of the week, and they waste half a day for anyone who does not check them first.
| Stop | When it is closed |
|---|---|
| Strada Nuova Museums | in summer open every day, but on Monday only Palazzo Rosso opens; in winter closed on Monday |
| Museum of the Treasury of San Lorenzo | closed on Sunday, and on weekdays it opens only 9 am-12 noon and 3-6 pm |
| Villa del Principe | open every day |
| Staglieno cemetery | open every day, free admission |
A simple rule comes out of that: the first day belongs in the centre (Strada Nuova and the cathedral), because it is the one with the most constraints, and the second belongs to the two stops that are always open. And avoid Sunday for the centre if you can: the Museum of the Treasury is closed, and without it the cathedral loses half its content.
Day 1, morning: Strada Nuova, the street born as a district of palaces
Via Garibaldi used to be called Strada Nuova, and it is, in effect, the first luxury land development in modern European history. In 1550 the Republic decided to open a street in an outlying area and to sell the plots to the great families, under a set of rules that dictated height, alignment and decorum. The result is a street two hundred and fifty metres long where no palace has ever been cut down, chopped up or gutted.
Three of those palaces are today a single museum with a single ticket. Palazzo Rosso holds the picture gallery of the Brignole Sale family, with seven Van Dycks including the two pendant portraits of Anton Giulio Brignole Sale and his wife Paolina Adorno, one of the rare cases where a pair of Van Dyck portraits has stayed together in the house it was painted for. Palazzo Bianco has Caravaggio’s Ecce Homo and a collection of Flemish painting that tells you everything about Genoese trade. Palazzo Doria Tursi, which is also the city hall, keeps Paganini’s violin.
Count them properly: they are three buildings, and they want three hours at least. If time is short, skip Tursi and keep the other two.
Read also: The works to see in the Strada Nuova Museums, with the route room by room.
Day 1, afternoon: San Lorenzo cathedral and its underground treasury
From the end of via Garibaldi you go down towards the sea through the alleys, and in ten minutes you stand in front of San Lorenzo, which is perhaps the most famous black-and-white striped facade in Italy after the one in Siena. The stripes are not a whim: in Genoa the black promontory stone alternating with white marble was a privilege granted only to families that had rendered a service to the Republic, and the cathedral takes it for the whole building.
Inside there is something you do not expect. In the right-hand aisle, resting on the floor, sits a 381 millimetre naval shell more than a metre tall: it was fired by the British battleship Malaya on 9 February 1941, went through the roof and two walls, stopped against a pillar and did not explode. The one on display is a full-size reproduction, and the distinction matters: the original device was defused and is kept elsewhere.
Under the presbytery, in a space carved out of the rock, is the Museum of the Treasury, which is two museums in one. There is the collection (the Sacro Catino, the chalcedony dish linked to the beheading of the Baptist, the casket of Barbarossa) and there is the container, designed between 1952 and 1956 by Franco Albini: a series of circular chambers in bare stone, dark, with the objects suspended in the void and lit one by one. It is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of twentieth-century Italian museum design, and it is worth the visit even if relics leave you cold.
Read also: San Lorenzo cathedral and the Museum of the Treasury.
Day 1, evening: the alleys, which are a monument in their own right
The historic centre of Genoa is the largest in Europe among those of medieval layout still intact, and walking inside it after sunset is an experience that requires no tickets. From San Lorenzo take via San Lorenzo towards the harbour, then climb back up through piazza Banchi and via degli Orefici. The right dose is an hour, without a map.
Day 2, morning: Villa del Principe, an admiral’s palace
What is a Renaissance villa with an Italian garden doing two hundred metres from Principe station, wedged between the flyover and the railway tracks? It is there because in 1521 that ground lay on the shore, and Andrea Doria, the most powerful admiral in the Mediterranean, built himself the house from which he could see his own fleet.
The palace was decorated by Perino del Vaga, a pupil of Raphael who arrived in Genoa after the sack of Rome in 1527. His masterpiece is the vault of the Fall of the Giants, of 1533: Jupiter strikes down the giants, who tumble out towards the viewer, and the political message is transparent, because the Jupiter of the vault is Andrea Doria and the giants are his enemies. The rooms also hold the tapestries of the battle of Lepanto, woven on commission from the family to celebrate the victory of 1571.
That battle comes up often in our articles, and in a surprising form: in the oratories of Palermo Giacomo Serpotta modelled it in stucco across an entire wall.
Read also: Villa del Principe, the house of Andrea Doria.
Day 2, afternoon: Staglieno, the sculpture museum nobody calls a museum
The monumental cemetery of Staglieno is open every day and costs nothing. Across three hundred and thirty thousand square metres it contains the densest collection of nineteenth-century middle-class sculpture in Europe, and the reason is economic before it is artistic: between 1870 and 1900 the Genoese bourgeoisie, enriched by maritime trade, bought with its tombs the social standing that the patrician families had always denied it.
The piece that explains everything is the monument to Caterina Campodonico, a street seller of hazelnuts and necklaces who paid for her statue in instalments, while she was alive, so that she could see herself portrayed with her wares in her hand. She is carved in marble like a noblewoman, with her shawl and her rings of dough, and the inscription in Genoese dialect is signed by her. A little further on stands the tomb of Giuseppe Mazzini, a block of stone without rhetoric at the foot of a flight of steps.
Read also: The monumental cemetery of Staglieno.
If you have a third day, or if you are here in October
With one more day the thing to do is see the Rolli that normally stay shut. The Rolli system was not a list of monuments: it was the official register of the private houses that the Republic requisitioned in turn to lodge its state guests, divided into three bands according to the rank of the visitor. A notion of public hospitality funded by private citizens that exists in no other European city.
Read also: The Rolli palaces, how they worked and when you can visit them.
Practical information
Data checked on 3 September 2026 on the official websites of the Musei di Genova, the Diocese of Genoa and Villa del Principe. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you leave.
Tickets. The combined ticket for the Strada Nuova Museums costs 14 euros, covers the three palaces and the Museo di Sant’Agostino and is valid over several days. The reduced ticket costs 9 euros; for young people between 18 and 25 it drops to 2 euros. The Museum of the Treasury of San Lorenzo costs 6 euros full price and 5 reduced. Villa del Principe costs 11 euros full price and 9 reduced. Staglieno cemetery is free.
Opening hours. From 20 April to 30 September the Strada Nuova Museums open every day from 10 am to 7 pm, with the caveat that on Monday only Palazzo Rosso opens; last admission is one hour before closing. The Museum of the Treasury opens Monday to Saturday from 9 am to 12 noon and from 3 pm to 6 pm, and closes on Sunday. Villa del Principe opens every day from 10 am to 6 pm, with last admission at 5 pm. Staglieno normally opens from 7.30 am to 5 pm, but observes public-holiday closures: check again if travelling on a holiday.
Free admission. During the month of August the Strada Nuova Museums are free for anyone over 65. At Villa del Principe children up to the age of 6 go in free.
Getting there. Genova Piazza Principe and Genova Brignole are the two main railway stations, and they sit one metro stop apart. Villa del Principe is a five-minute walk from Piazza Principe. Via Garibaldi is reached from the Darsena metro stop, or on foot from Brignole in a quarter of an hour. For Staglieno, buses 12, 13, 14 and 34 leave from the centre, and the ride takes about half an hour.
How much time it takes. The full itinerary fills two whole days. The Strada Nuova Museums alone ask for three hours, the cathedral with the treasury an hour and a half, Villa del Principe an hour and a half, Staglieno two hours.
Where to go from here
Genoa is not a city you can tell in a day, and each of the five stops on this itinerary has an article of its own. If you have to choose only one, start with the Rolli palaces: they are the system that explains why everything else stands where it stands.
And if you are interested in the Caravaggio in Palazzo Bianco, the natural sequel is the life and style of Caravaggio, because the Genoese Ecce Homo belongs to the years of his flight from Rome.
Photographs by Davide Papalini, Zairon, Superchilum, Sailko and Angelo G. Valle from Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA and CC BY licences.
