Palazzo San Giorgio: Genoa’s Medieval Civic and Maritime Administration Building
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Italy
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Genoese, Italian
- Site type
- Civic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page13 sections
History
Palazzo San Giorgio is a historic civic and port-administration building in Genoa, Italy, constructed by the medieval Genoese commune between 1257 and 1260 in the Gothic period. Commissioned by Guglielmo Boccanegra, Genoa’s Capitano del Popolo, a civic officeholder representing communal authority, it was intended to provide a seat of civil power distinct from the religious authority centered at San Lorenzo Cathedral.
Foundation as a civic palace
The palace was erected at the center of the Sottoripa seaside portico, then Genoa’s principal economic center, beside the terminal of the Soziglia stream after it had been placed underground. Its designer was Friar Oliverio, a Cistercian monk from the Abbey of Sant’Andrea in Sestri Ponente. He had also designed the seaward extension of Genoa’s Old Pier. Because the sea reached the building’s foundations, it was initially known as the “sea palace.”
Its municipal role was brief. After Boccanegra was deposed and exiled in 1262, the municipality first moved elsewhere and later established itself in the palace of Alberto Fieschi at Serravalle. That complex developed into the present Doge’s Palace. Palazzo San Giorgio was then also used as a prison. Marco Polo was held there after his capture by the Genoese at the Battle of Curzola in 1298. During almost a year of detention, he dictated his travel memoirs to Rustichello da Pisa. The work later circulated as The Travels of Marco Polo, also known as The Description of the World.
From municipal building to financial institution
Sections of chains taken from Porto Pisano were displayed on the palace’s external porticoes from 1290. From 1340, the building housed magistracies supervising port traffic, customs offices, and the offices of the Compere. These institutions managed loans that citizens made to the municipality.
In 1407, the Compere were united as the Casa delle Compere e dei Banchi di San Giorgio, known in English as the Bank of Saint George. This powerful Genoese financial institution administered public debt, tax revenues, and overseas territories. The entire palace passed to its administration in 1451, giving the building the name it retains today. Later eastward expansions reflected the bank’s growing economic and political authority, including its administration of Corsica and Genoese territories along the two Rivieras.
Renaissance expansion and decoration
The palace was restored in 1535 and substantially enlarged in 1570. A new east wing with a monumental façade facing the port was added, while the medieval section was renovated. Statues of the Compere’s benefactors were installed in the rooms. The new wing contained customs offices, rooms and vaults for coins and precious metals, and the Bank’s archive.
Andrea Semino frescoed the new wing’s façades in 1592, but the Bank’s Protectors later commissioned Lazzaro Tavarone to replace his work. Between 1606 and 1608, Tavarone painted the sea façade with Genoese notables and a central image of Saint George killing the dragon. A clock tower was added at the center of the façade during the seventeenth century.
Decline, restoration, and port administration
The Bank of Saint George ceased operating in 1797 and was dissolved in 1805 after the Ligurian Republic was annexed to the French Empire. The palace retained the Bank’s extensive archives and the customs offices, but it entered a period of severe deterioration. In the 1830s, a proposal to demolish the building during the extension of the Carrettiera Carlo Alberto provoked protests from citizens and intellectuals.
At the end of the nineteenth century, Alfredo d’Andrade restored the oldest section and the principal rooms. He removed later additions, exposed the original facing by stripping away plaster, and remodelled the medieval wing in an interpretive neo-Gothic manner. His work emphasized the contrast between the city-facing medieval section and the port-facing Renaissance wing. The restored interiors were hypothetical reconstructions rather than securely documented medieval arrangements.
In 1903, the palace was assigned to the newly established Autonomous Consortium of the Port of Genoa, following the initiative of its first president, General Stefano Canzio. The building was initially intended for exhibitions and cultural events, but the assignment also continued the restoration of the Renaissance wing and established its modern port-administration function.
The sea-front fresco was reconstructed between 1912 and 1914 by Lodovico Pogliaghi, using surviving traces, Tavarone’s sketches, and a large canvas by Paggi preserved in the palace library. After the frescoes deteriorated again, the principal façade was restored between 1987 and 1989 under Raimondo Sirotti. Lorenzo Antognetti reconstructed the design from Pogliaghi’s sketches, d’Andrade’s drawings, period photographs, and remaining traces, using the dusting technique. This restoration formed part of the preparations for the 1992 Columbian celebrations.
In 1995, Italy’s national reform of port authorities replaced the Autonomous Consortium with a new port authority, which retained its headquarters in the palace. Palazzo San Giorgio currently houses the Port System Authority of the Western Ligurian Sea. Its preserved port archive contains documentation from 1870 to 1945, including records of the port expansion of 1870 to 1888, the Autonomous Port Consortium from 1903 to 1945, and the construction of the Sampierdarena port basin in the 1930s.
The elevated road inaugurated in 1965 reduced traffic around the palace but formed a substantial visual barrier between it and the ancient port. The surrounding streets were later pedestrianized after an underpass was constructed between Piazza Caricamento and Piazza Cavour in the 1990s. The building’s dual Gothic and Renaissance character now reflects its medieval municipal origin, its long association with the Bank of Saint George, and its continuing relationship with Genoa’s maritime administration.
Remains
Palazzo San Giorgio consists of two connected but visually distinct sections. The medieval building faces the Sottoripa portico, while the Renaissance wing projects toward the sea and overlooks Via della Mercanzia, the short street linking Piazza Caricamento with Piazza Cavour near the ancient port. Together they preserve the palace’s transformation from a communal seat into a financial and maritime institution.
Medieval civic section
City-facing façade
The medieval section dates from about 1260 and is seen today largely through d’Andrade’s nineteenth-century remodelling. Its ground floor is built of squared grey Promontorio stone, while the upper floors use exposed red brick. Ghibelline battlements, merlons associated with the imperial faction in medieval Italy, crown the building. A portico of five pointed arches rests on four columns and an outer pillar at each end. Three-light and four-light windows articulate the façade, which was originally largely unornamented.
The central arch contains the former principal entrance, which remained the palace’s main entrance until 1912. A lion-form mascaron, or mask-like sculpted face, is placed above it, while two smaller lion heads occupy the side corners of the portico. These Gothic sculptures incorporate ancient Greek influences. They were brought from the Venetian representative palace in Constantinople known as the Pantocrator and obtained by the Genoese in connection with their alliance with the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos and the Treaty of Nymphaeum, a thirteenth-century agreement granting Genoese commercial privileges in return for support against the Latin Empire.
A foundation plaque stands beside the former city-facing entrance. The façade formerly carried a late-fifteenth-century fresco by Carlo Braccesco, known as Carlo del Mantegna, showing Saint George and the Dragon. The painting remained well preserved in the eighteenth century, while only traces survived before the nineteenth-century restoration.
Medieval courtyard and reconstructed rooms
The medieval section contains an internal porticoed courtyard with stone columns. D’Andrade’s reconstructed rooms include the Manica Lunga, where a fifteenth-century bas-relief of Saint George and the Dragon by Michele D’Aria is preserved. Another room, called the Captain of the People, contains fifteenth-century statues of Bank benefactors by Michele D’Aria, Antonio Della Porta, and Pace Gagini. These interiors present an interpretive reconstruction of medieval spaces rather than a fully documented survival of their original arrangement.
Renaissance port wing
Sea façade and painted decoration
The Renaissance wing faces the port and Via della Mercanzia. Its painted plaster imitates marble cladding, with ashlar decoration at ground level and pilasters dividing the elevation into three sections. The present sea façade carries frescoes by Raimondo Sirotti, based on Pogliaghi’s early-twentieth-century reconstructions, which themselves reinterpreted Tavarone’s lost paintings.
Above the monumental marble portal, a polychrome Saint George on horseback kills the dragon. Sirotti freely reinterpreted the subject in 1990 because no trace of the seventeenth-century original remained. Painted bronze-coloured figures in false niches flank the central image. They represent the annalist Caffaro, Andrea Doria, Doge Simone Boccanegra or, under an alternative identification, Guglielmo Boccanegra, the crusader commander Guglielmo Embriaco known as “Maulhead,” Christopher Columbus, and the admiral Biagio Assereto.
The façade also includes false-bronze figures of Janus and Neptune and the coat of arms of the Conservatori del Mare, officials responsible for governing Genoa’s port during the republic. The painted marble, ashlar, pilasters, and false bronze figures use illusionistic treatment to imitate three-dimensional materials and architectural forms. The façade culminates in the seventeenth-century clock tower.
East and north elevations
The other façades of the Renaissance wing use motifs based on d’Andrade’s drawings, including figures associated with maritime commerce and port labour. On Piazza Raibetta, the east side contains a large eighteenth-century marble-and-stucco aedicule, a small framed shrine or niche, with a statue of the Assumption and two angels beneath a metal canopy.
Along the north façade facing Piazza Caricamento, several columns survive from the late-medieval portico that connected the palace with the now-vanished mint building. One of these columns has a spherocubic capital, a capital combining spherical and cubic forms.
Compere Hall and interior works
The present sea-side entrance on Via della Mercanzia opens onto a broad staircase leading to the Renaissance Compere Hall on the first floor. Wall niches in the hall contain statues of the Bank’s benefactors. The room also holds Domenico Piola’s painting of the Madonna, Queen of Genoa, with Saint John the Baptist and Saint George. Other works include the Genoese coat of arms with Justice and Fortitude by Francesco De Ferrari, dated 1491, and the Bank’s emblem by Luchino da Milan, dated 1444.
The Hall of the Protectors contains a fireplace by Giovanni Giacomo Della Porta dated 1554 and Paggi’s late-sixteenth-century painting of the Madonna and Saint George. Saint George and the dragon recur throughout the exterior and interior decoration, linking the palace’s imagery with Genoa and its republican identity.
