Palazzo Rosso

In one of the rooms of Palazzo Rosso, a young Genoese nobleman sits on a rearing horse and lifts his hat. Anthony van Dyck, the Flemish painter then in his late twenties, portrayed Anton Giulio Brignole-Sale this way in 1627, and painted his wife, Paolina Adorno, in a full-length portrait to match. Anton Giulio's mother, Geronima Sale, appears in a third canvas with her small daughter. These are family pictures, and they stayed in the family's hands for nearly 250 years.

The palace itself came later. It was built between 1671 and 1677 on Strada Nuova, today's Via Garibaldi, for two Brignole-Sale brothers, Ridolfo and Gio Francesco, with two main floors so that each had a grand apartment of his own. The red of its facade gave it the name. Inside, the Genoese painters Gregorio De Ferrari and Domenico Piola covered the ceilings with frescoes of the four seasons. Alongside the van Dycks hangs a portrait of a young man by Albrecht Dürer, the German master, dated 1506.

The family line ended with Maria Brignole-Sale, Duchess of Galliera. In 1874 she gave the palace, its frescoed rooms and its pictures to the city of Genoa, to add, as she put it, to the city's decorum and usefulness.