The Ducale Apartment

The apartment

The archived pages describe the Ducale apartment as occupying the 4th floor of its building — there is no lift, so it involves climbing stairs. Inside, the ceilings are high and vaulted, with fresco decoration, opening onto one wide, bright room with an intermediate (mezzanine) level and a practical kitchenette. The apartment was said to sleep up to four guests, offered on the same bed-and-breakfast basis as the hotel's own rooms, and described as "a few steps" from Palazzo Cicala itself.

We couldn't verify which specific building this is — the archive doesn't name it, and we found nothing that lets us confidently identify a 17th-century building directly facing Palazzo Ducale as this one, so we're not guessing. What we can say more about, since it's the apartment's whole namesake, is Palazzo Ducale itself.

Palazzo Ducale, across the way

Palazzo Ducale's origins go back to 1291, when the officials Corrado Doria and Oberto Spinola acquired a cluster of Doria family buildings on the site for the commune's government; three years later the adjoining Fieschi palace, with its "Grimaldina" tower, was bought too, extending the complex. The building took the name "Ducale" in 1339, when Simon Boccanegra became Genoa's first Doge and made it his seat, and it was enlarged further eastward and northward under Doge Antoniotto Adorno later in the same century.

Much of what visitors see today, though, dates from a rebuild forced by disaster: a fire on the night of 3 November 1777 destroyed a large part of the palace's central body, including its main façade and roofs. The architect Simone Cantoni won the competition to rebuild it, and his work between 1778 and 1783 gave the palace the monumental neoclassical façade — eight giant Doric columns beneath a sculpted pediment, completed in 1781 — that now faces Piazza Matteotti, one of the earliest examples of the neoclassical style in Genoa. Following a 1992 restoration, and under the Genoa Palazzo Ducale Foundation for Culture since 2008, the building today serves as a cultural venue for exhibitions and public events rather than a seat of government. See our landmarks guide for more, including the palace's tower and former prison.

The Ducale apartment isn't the only one of the five apartments named for what it faces: a few streets away, inside Palazzo Cicala itself, the Duomo apartment looks out the other way, onto Piazza San Lorenzo and the Cathedral — both squares only a few minutes' walk apart in Genoa's compact historic core.