Palazzo dell'Accademia Ligustica

The palace presents a formal 19th-century Ligurian neoclassical layout, with a regular façade and covered walkways along multiple sides. The north and west porticoes, part of the original construction, shelter the ground-level walkways; the east portico was added around 1900 when new streets were opened. Much of the exterior retains the nineteenth-century design vocabulary adapted to the reconfigured urban setting.

An octagonal entrance atrium (the main entrance hall) sits immediately inside the principal doorway and displays four marble statues set into wall niches. Two represent Luca Cambiaso and Filippo Parodi, carved by Luigi Orengo in 1935, and two portray Bernardo Strozzi and Bernardo Schiaffino, executed by Guido Galletti in 1939. From the atrium a grand staircase rises, formed of cantilevered ramps that sweep around a central well and make prominent use of multicoloured marbles. The staircase remains the main internal route linking floors and retains its polychrome finishes.

Near the first landing stands a statue of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, probably attributed to Guglielmo della Porta and the workshop of his father Giovanni Giacomo; this figure was transferred from the sixteenth-century Acquasola gate when that gate was taken down in 1837. At the top of the stair flights two sixteenth-century statues, representing Saints James and Philip and rescued from a church of the same name, occupy prominent positions. Opposite one balustrade sits a late nineteenth-century bust of the painter Nicolò Barabino by Antonio Allegretti, dated 1894.

On the second floor a covered gallery (loggia, a covered gallery) is supported by large monumental columns reclaimed from the demolished San Domenico church. The gallery walls contain four niche-mounted busts: a bust of the palace’s original designer (sculpted by Giovanni Battista Cevasco, 1844), and later nineteenth-century commemorative busts of Ernesto Rayper (by Giulio Monteverde, 1874), Pietro Resasco (by Agostino Allegro, 1874) and Raffaele Granara (by Vittorio Lavezzari, 1885). Throughout the interior and on stair landings are numerous other marble works and architectural fragments that were moved into the palace from earlier structures, and these reused pieces remain in place following the postwar repairs.