Palazzo Gerolamo Grimaldi

Palazzo Gerolamo Grimaldi in Genoa, Italy, is a mid‑16th‑century city palace erected under the Republic of Genoa for the banker Gerolamo Grimaldi Oliva. Constructed between 1536 and 1544, the building became one of the grand urban residences of Genoa and later featured richly appointed interiors and façades that marked it among the palaces chosen to receive state visitors under the Rolli system. Its prominence is reflected in engraved plates of the seventeenth century and in its later inscription among the forty‑two Rolli palaces recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Construction and early decoration took place across the second half of the 1500s. The site was acquired in 1536 and the main building phase was completed by the mid‑1540s. Between about 1556 and 1566 Giovanni Battista Grimaldi, son of Gerolamo, sponsored an ambitious program of interior painting that introduced major fresco cycles by important Genoese masters. By the late sixteenth century the palace entered the civic lists that assigned private residences to host visiting dignitaries, initially ranked in the second class and from 1599 elevated to the first class.

At the end of the sixteenth century the palace was enlarged with an annex to the southwest in 1594. In 1697 a significant alteration changed the spatial arrangement when the open central loggia was enclosed and the first courtyard was roofed, transforming that space into a closed atrium. Late‑eighteenth‑century urban remodelling, carried out during the opening of the new street known then as Strada Nuovissima (now Via Cairoli) between 1778 and 1786, reshaped the lower garden and produced a rebuilt southern façade with a covered forepart and terrace. The rebuilt south front received a painted sundial by Giacomo Brusco, and that sundial later gave the palace an alternate name referring to the meridian or sundial.

The Grimaldi Oliva family retained ownership for almost three centuries before selling the palace in 1835. During the nineteenth century the property passed through further hands. At the start of the twentieth century Evan Mackenzie, a representative of the Lloyd’s insurance network, commissioned conversion of parts of the building for office use. Between 1907 and 1913 the palace accommodated the Lloyd Italico firm, and from 1926 sections were occupied by municipal offices. Early twentieth‑century renovations enlarged service buildings in the rear garden, enclosed the main internal court under a stained‑glass rooflight and introduced new tempera vault decorations in a revived Renaissance manner.

The building saw wartime and civic functions in the twentieth century. In May 1915 some rooms were set aside as a hospital for Italian officers. Later decades brought further public uses, including a period in the 1960s when the palace housed the Genoa Conservatory. Through successive adaptations the palace remained a public and semi‑public space while retaining important painted decoration and architectural elements from its long history.