What to do and see in Genoa, Liguria: The Best Specialty Museums

In a villa on the heights of the Val Polcevera, visitors can admire agricultural tools, furniture of peasant houses, handicraft production tools and photographs illustrating the chestnut, cereals, grapes, olive and hemp crop cycles. The museum has a large collection of rural and regional folklore (historical Ligurian settlements, farmhouses, family life, traditional crafts and popular religiosity). The museum is open on Saturday on booking

Villa del Principe - Palazzo di Andrea Doria is the richest and most sumptuos noble household of the city of Genoa, the Villa of the only Prince Genoa ever had. It was 1529 when Andrea Doria, skilful admiral and legendary man of arms, began the constructions that would have lead to the rise of this wonderful Villa overlooking the Gulf of Genoa. To live its splendour once again it is sufficient to stroll through its halls, in wonder in front of its amazing fresco paintings and incredible tapestries.

The Museum of World Cultures is housed in the Castello D’Albertis, home of captain Enrico Alberto D’Albertis, its creator. After travelling by sea and land between the 19th-20th centuries, the Captain’s home collects pieces of his world in a romantic setting between “Chambers of Wonder” and colonial trophies. His castle testifies to the strong fascination that the distant worlds he had visited exerted on his soul, permeated with Genoese traditions and the love for the sea, as well as curiosity about the unknown and the unventured. But there is more. At the entry of the 16th-century bastion, on which the castle was built, starts a second exhibition, where archaeological and ethnographic pieces are displayed through the dialogue with the peoples who produced them, thus giving voice to multiple perspectives and making our certainties relative. The Castello D’Albertis is not only the home of Captain D’Albertis but our own house.

Since 1993, the museum is located in Nervi, in the 18th-century Villa Grimaldi Fassio, acquired by the Municipality of Genoa in 1979. The important collections of 19th-20th-century art of the Frugone brothers include paintings, sculptures and drawings by Italian and foreign artists from the second half of the 19th and early-20th century. Among others, Bistolfi, Fontanesi, Mancini, Messina, Segantini, Signorini, Boldini, Rubino, Milesi, Tito, Michetti and Sorolla y Bastida.

The archive preserves the documents relating to the administration of the city between the 15th and mid-20th centuries and holds a collection of manuscripts dating to the 14th–19th centuries. The archive houses the permanent exhibition titled Amole, libbre, cannelle, dedicated to the historical collection of weights and units of measurement which were used in the city before the final introduction of the metric system in 1805.

The Renaissance villa of Giovanni Andrea Doria houses the maritime collections of Genoa and the Rivieras, ranging from the 15th to the 19th century. Visitors can admire precious maps, paintings, drawings, ship models, construction and navigation tools, and “visit” the old shipyards and workshops of the maritime world. Of great significance are the stories of material culture by Ligurian sailors and shipwrights. In recent years, the museum has established itself as a veritable cultural arena of Genoa’s Ponente, a meeting place for Associations offering a rich program of art exhibitions, and cultural and social events.

Opened on 5 May 1915 in the Palazzo Bianco, since 1934 it is based in the house where Giuseppe Mazzini was born, in Via Lomellini 11. The Museum of Risorgimento preserves and exhibits a rich historical and artistic heritage (documents, paintings, prints, weapons, uniforms, photographs, memorabilia), through which the iconic figures of the Risorgimento come back to life: Mazzini and the republican and democratic movement, Garibaldi and the Red Shirts, Goffredo Mameli and the Italian anthem. Enriched by multimedia installations, the exhibition traces the historical events that led to the unification of Italy, the Genoese anti-Austrian revolt of 1746 until the inauguration of the Monument to the Thousand in Quarto in 1915. An important location was given to the manuscript bearing the first draft of the Italian anthem signed by Goffredo Mameli, sung in public for the first time in Genoa on 10 December 1847, and to other pieces relating to Giuseppe Mazzini, including the his guitar.

In the splendid setting of the park overlooking the cliffs of Nervi, the halls of a noble residence of the early 20th century host collections of paintings and drawings, furniture, antique clocks, ceramics, silverware and nativity figurines of the 18th-19th centuries. Of particular interest are the canvas by Magnasco.

With a special focus on decorative arts and propaganda between 1880-1945, the Wolfsonian Museum starts from the taste for the exotic, which was popular in late 19th-century Italy, to then reveal the main linguistic and expressive currents of the first half of the 20th century, from Art Nouveau to Art Deco and Rationalism. The cultural complexity of the time is shown by the extraordinary variety of pieces (paintings, sculptures, furniture, decorative artworks, everyday objects and industrial designs).