Palazzi dei Rolli of Genoa - Italy - World Heritage List

Erected by Bernardo Spazio for Pantaleo Spinola and later continued by Pietro Orsolino until the building was completed in 1558, today it houses a bank. The building's facade depicts the allegorical scene of Prudence and Vigilance. While the facade is fairly simple, it is enlivened by the windows' layout, jutting balconies, and, especially, by the portal surmounted by two marble statues.
The ground floor is richly decorated with frescoes depicting Biblical episodes painted by Giovanni Carlone and his brother Giovanni Battista during the first decades of the 1600s. The Art Nouveau glass compass, produced in 1923, is especially praiseworthy.
In the hall on the piano nobile, which may be accessed by climbing an elegant staircase, the vault was frescoed at the end of the seventeenth century by the Genoese artist Domenico Piola and an artist from Emilia, Paolo Brozzi, who specialized in quadraturas based on calculated perspective. The fresco consists of a mythological scene depicting the offering of the keys of the temple of Janus to Jove.
From the hall one may reach the terrace, whose nymphaeum once contained the famous marble group sculpture depicting the Rape of Helen, a masterpiece of Baroque sculpture produced by Marseilles artist Pierre Puget and now housed in the Museum of Sant'Agostino.