Palace of Saint George, Genoa, Liguria, Italy, Europe
Palazzo San Giorgio, Palazzo delle Compere or St George, is a historic building of the most important and popular of Genoa. Currently it houses the headquarters of the Port Authority of Genoa. The building, including in the district of Molo, consists of two distinct parts: an older part, a typical example of medieval civil architecture, with the prospect facing the porch of Sottoripa, and a renaissance, facing the sea, in which prospectus, overlooking via the Merchandise, the short street that connects Piazza Loading and Piazza Cavour, near the old port, opens the portal of the main entrance. Initially called the palace of the sea, because it directly overlooking the docks, with the sea that lapped at the foundation, was built and designed by Friar Oliverio, architect and monaco Cistercian, around the middle of the thirteenth century as the town hall; It became the seat of the customs and in the fifteenth century it passed to the Banco di San Giorgio, from which it took its name. Expanded in the sixteenth century, it was completely restored in the second half of the work of Alfredo d'Andrade after a period of decline; from 1903 it houses the offices of the Port of Genoa. The building is today in a double aspect to the porch of the Ripa the thirteenth century building, in red brick and stone base, and the sixteenth-wing reaching out to the harbor, with the painted plaster. The part to the east, facing the facades of Sottoripa, is medieval, dating from 1260, which today we see in its restructuring nineteenth century; gray stone promontory square on the ground floor and exposed brick on the upper floors, crowned by Ghibelline battlements, the base has a portico consisting of five pointed arches supported by four columns and a pillar at each end. The facade, lightened by three lights and four, is devoid of ornaments: There was a time a fresco, made in the late fifteenth century by Carlo Braccesco, said Carlo del Mantegna, depicting St. George and the dragon. Of this painting, still well preserved in the eighteenth century, there were still traces of the first nineteenth century restorations, as evidenced by several authors of the time. Through the central arch of the portico opens the entrance, which was one of the building until 1912, when the new entrance was opened on the sea. Above the portal is a mask with a figure of a lion, and two other small lion heads you see on the edges at the sides of the porch; these small sculptures, Gothic but with influences of ancient Greece, were from the palace representative of the Venetians in Constantinople, called the Pantocrator, that the Genoese had obtained by the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus for their help against the Empire Latin Eastern and decided in the Treaty of Nymphaeum. Next to the entrance there is the plaque celebrating the foundation of the building. Via della Merchandise overlooking the wing century, with its facade entirely covered with frescoes by Raimondo Sirotti that follow those made at the beginning of the twentieth century by Ludovico Pogliaghi, which in turn had rebuilt, reinterpreting them, the original of Tavarone. The painted decoration of the facade plays a marble cladding with rusticated ground floor and pilasters that divide the table into three sections. At the center of the facade, above the imposing marble portal access, is the figure polychrome depicting St. George on horseback slaying the dragon, recurring image in many portals of the buildings of the old town: the saint in the Middle Ages was in fact considered the symbol of the Republic. The subject was freely interpreted by Sirotti in 1990, having disappeared all traces of the original seventeenth century. On either side, from left to right, are painted six statues, bronze color, inside false niches, depicting some historical figures of the Republic: the chronicler Caffaro, the Prince Andrea Doria, the Doge Simone Boccanegra (according to some the painting would represent rather the founder of the palace, Guglielmo Boccanegra), the leader crusader William Embriaco said hammer head, the navigator Christopher Columbus and finally admiral Benedetto Zaccaria. Complete the decoration figures of Janus and Neptune, also in faux bronze, and the emblem of the Conservative of the Sea, the body entrusted with the government of the port at the time of the Republic of Genoa. The facade culminates with the clock tower. From the entrance located in the Merchandise, in the statement to the sea, through a wide staircase leads to the sixteenth-century hall Compere, on the first floor; the living room is surrounded by niches in the walls with statues of the benefactors of the Tour.