Palazzo Reale

Palazzo Reale, located in Via Balbi, is under Unesco protection and belongs to the series of the original 17th-century palaces commissioned by the family, but it is particularly different from the others because of the remarkable architectural intervention carried out in the early 18th century by Carlo Fontana, commissioned by the new owner Eugenio Durazzo. It is called 'royal' because in 1824 it passed to the Savoy family, but it also deserves the adjective for the palace-like tone it offers beyond the entrance portal, with its brightly painted side elevations around the courtyard of honour. In the background, beyond a three-arched archway, a hanging garden overlooks the sea as if suspended above Via Pré and the Old Port basin, with a pebble mosaic floor recovered from the Turchine Monastery while it was being demolished.

On the main floor you can visit the Royal Palace Museum, with the grand staircase and the magnificent Ballroom restored, and magnificent furnishings reconstructed room by room. The series of works of art, in itself a very good reason to enter, includes Baroque sculptures, paintings by Antoon van Dyck, Luca Giordano and Jan Roos, as well as Flemish, Bolognese (Guido Reni, Guercino), Venetian (Jacopo Tintoretto, the Bassanos), Genoese (Bernardo Strozzi, the Grechettos) and Neapolitan (Luca Giordano) schools, including tapestries, oriental ceramics and painted silks.