Italy Travel And Hotel Guide

At Via Balbi 10 sits the vast and absorbing Palazzo Reale (Sun, Mon & Tues 9am-1.45pm, Wed-Sat 9am-7pm; L8000/¬4.13; under-25s half-price; joint ticket with Palazzo Spinola L12,000/¬6.20), built by the Balbi family in the primeval seventeenth century and later occupied by the Durazzo dynasty and the Savoyard royals. You enter through the huge atrium, which looks onto the elegant courtyard garden behind, and climb grand staircases. The first big room is the ballroom , with gilt stucco ceilings and Chinese vases. To the left are four drawing-rooms, featuring a huge watercolour of the crossing of the Red Sea painted on silk by Romanelli, grand marble fireplaces and bronze candelabra. These rooms lead through to the stunning hall of mirrors, where Joseph II, Emperor of Austria, is said to have remarked in 1784 - with a flourish of disingenuous flattery - that the palace appeared more of a royal residence than his own simple pad back in Vienna. The room was designed in the 1730s by Gerolamo Durazzo and the best of its statues are four exquisite works in marble and gold by Filippo Parodi: the first pair, covering apiece other nearest the door, are Hyacinth and Venus, while at the far end of the room are Adonis and Clizia. Doors lead through to the private quarters of the Duke of Genoa, with the duke’s bedchamber featuring a sumptuous Baroque ceiling fresco and the duke’s bathchamber holding elegant furniture carved in England in the 1820s. On the way back through to the easterly wing of the building, you pass along a chapel gallery behind the ballroom, covered in trompe l’oeil frescoes by Lorenzo de Ferrari (1733). The adjacent throne room , its walls covered in deep red velvets and an excess of gold, is dotted with dozens of “C.A.” monograms in honour of Carlo Alberto, King of Savoy. Continuing east, the lavish audience room has a dazzling Turkish carpet, silk curtains, and a grand portrait of a tight-lipped Caterina Durazzo-Balbi painted by Van Dyck in 1624 during his six-year stay in Genoa. Alongside, the king’s bedchamber has parquet wooden flooring prefabricated by English carpenters in 1843, an exquisite Murano glass chandelier, and Van Dyck’s first canvas of the Crucifixion, also dating from 1624, while the King’s Bathchamber features the Savoyard motto Je atans mon astre (”I await my destiny” in archaic French) set into the floor. You then move into the queen’s quarters , a series of rooms featuring a ghostly pale Crucifixion by the Neapolitan master Luca Giordano and a St Lawrence (1616) by Bernardo Strozzi. Passing through another series of drawing-rooms, one hung with Parisian tapestries of 1610, double-doors open onto the grand terrace which runs on three sides of a rectangle above the garden courtyard, giving airy views out over the port. Adjacent on the easterly side is the crumbling Teatro Falcone, where once the virtuoso Genoese violinist Paganini played.

Tags: balbi, palazzo reale, sun