The Duomo Apartment

The apartment

The archived pages describe the Duomo apartment's layout as one double room and one twin room (two single beds), the twin with its own small bathroom, plus a separate bathroom with a bathtub. A large living area with cooking facilities, a sofa, a TV and a computer with internet access completed the apartment — with the living area itself facing the Cathedral.

Because it sits inside the palazzo, the Duomo apartment's history is the building's own: constructed in the mid-16th century by the Cicala family, later restored in the 18th century by the Ferro family in the Rococo style, with the facade on Piazza delle Scuole Pie cited as a good example of that restoration. See our history page for the fuller story.

Piazza San Lorenzo, right outside

The piazza the apartment looks onto takes its name from the cathedral that dominates it, Genoa's Cattedrale di San Lorenzo. Building work on the cathedral is traditionally dated to around the turn of the 12th century; a fire in 1296 damaged the earlier Romanesque church, and the rebuilding that followed gave it the Gothic facade familiar today, in the black-and-white striped marble typical of Genoese civic and religious buildings of the period, completed between 1307 and 1312. For much of the Middle Ages, this piazza was the city's only public square. Genoa's Imperiale apartment, inside a palazzo built a little later for Vincenzo Imperiale, is described in the archived listings as roughly a minute's walk from the same piazza.

One more thing the archived pages mention, offered as local legend rather than established fact: the ghost of Scipione Cicala — described there as "a dreadful Genoese pirate" — is said to still haunt the palazzo's corridors.