Palazzo Gerolamo Grimaldi

The Palazzo Gerolamo Grimaldi also known as the palazzo della Meridiana is a building located in the salita di San Francesco at number 4 in the historical centre of Genoa, included on 13 July 2006 in the list of the forty-two palaces inscribed in the Rolli di Genova that became World Heritage by UNESCO on that date.

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.

The 18th-century façade on Strada Nuovissima

The opening of Strada Nuovissima (1778—1786, today's Via Cairoli) required the excavation of the lower garden and the reconstruction of the south façade, with the addition by Giacomo Brusco of a covered forepart surmounted by a terrace and a sundial painted on the façade, to which the current name Palazzo della Meridiana is owed. Evidence of the original 16th-century façade remains in Rubens' edition of Palazzi di Genova (1652). In the case of the sundial palace, Rubens decided to depict the façade on the garden instead of the main façade, as in the other palaces illustrated, as the elevation on the salita di San Francesco is irregular due to the slope of the land. This elevation has also changed from the original 16th-century one, which at the height of the marble balcony on the piano nobile had a deep recess in the centre corresponding to the open courtyard below.