Pinacoteca Civica

Savona's civic gallery preserves the city's oldest painting and a remarkable survival story: founded in 1868, its works were evacuated across a lake during the war and kept in storage for decades before settling in Palazzo Gavotti. The collection spans eight centuries of Ligurian art, from the Trecento to Guidobono's Baroque.

Why it matters

The gallery is the artistic memory of a city that Genoa tried to erase — after 1528 the victors razed Savona's churches and palazzi to build the Priamar fortress, so surviving canvases and panels are rarer than in neighbouring cities, and the museum was created in 1868 precisely to gather the works dispersed when religious orders were suppressed. What it lacks in quantity it repays in focus: the fifteenth-century "Crocifissione" by Donato de' Bardi hangs alone in its own room, the polyptychs of the Rovere century still wear their original gilded frames, and the Baroque section holds one of the rare paintings Bartolomeo Guidobono made for his native city. The gallery occupies a noble palace that also served as town hall and library.

What to notice

The portico and atrium display fourteenth- to eighteenth-century reliefs, doorframes and friezes salvaged from demolished buildings, including a slate Annunciation and a marble San Giorgio and the dragon that once crowned the fortress bridge. Trecento works include Taddeo di Bartolo's "Madonna col Bambino, angeli e donatori" and a carved "Cristo in croce e Santi" by a Campione sculptor. Donato de' Bardi's "Crocifissione" is displayed alone. Renaissance holdings include Vincenzo Foppa's Pala Fornari and panels by Giovanni Mazone, Ludovico Brea and Lorenzo Fasolo in their original frames, reflecting Rovere-era patronage. Baroque works include paintings by Giovanni Battista Carlone, Luciano Borzone, Valerio Castello and Domenico Piola, alongside Guidobono's "Annunciazione". The collection also includes works by the Ratti family and Giuseppe Frascheri.

Context and history

The museum's history reflects its changing civic role. Born in 1868 when the Ministry of Public Education ordered the municipality to house the works of orders suppressed by the 1864 laws, it opened its first painting and sculpture sections in two rooms of the Ospedale San Paolo in 1880, closed for sanitary reasons in 1888, and reopened in 1901 on the top floor of Palazzo Pozzobonello, a former convent. In 1939 it moved briefly to Palazzo Gavotti, only to be packed away as war approached: the pictures sheltered in turn at the Santuario della Pace in Albisola Superiore, the Abbey of Tiglieto and finally Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore, and came home to stay crated for years because no space was free. Reordered by Renzo Aiolfi and Pasquale Rotondi in 1962 in what was meant as a temporary home that lasted thirty years, the collection finally reached its definitive seat in Palazzo Gavotti in 2003. The palace itself had been a noble residence rebuilt along Renaissance lines at the end of the sixteenth century, donated in the eighteenth to the Opera Pia of the Misericordia, the city's town hall from 1861 to 1934, and the Civic Library until 1985.