Museo Civico di Sanremo (Palazzo Borea d'Olmo)

Sanremo’s civic museum presents the city’s archaeology and art, including a Rubens painting, a Flemish tapestry and works by illustrator and animator Antonio Rubino. Its historic seat is the Baroque Palazzo Borea d’Olmo beside the cathedral; the collections have been displayed at Palazzo Nota since 2016.

Why it matters

The civic museum brings together prehistoric and classical finds from the territory, a picture gallery that runs from the seventeenth century to contemporary work, and the studio world of Antonio Rubino, a founding figure of Italian illustration and animation. The historic museum building, Palazzo Borea d'Olmo, is a notable Baroque residence of the family that supplied Sanremo with mayors and bishops. Since 30 December 2016, the collections have been housed at Palazzo Nota, a seventeenth-century former town hall.

What to notice

The picture gallery includes Peter Paul Rubens’s Coronation of Saint Catherine, a seventeenth-century tapestry from the Flemish school of Oudenaarde, and Edward Lear’s Veduta di Eze. Lear, a landscape artist and writer, lived in Sanremo from 1870 to 1888. Works by Giacomo Grosso and Maurizio Carrega complete the historical collection. The Sala Rubino contains paintings, miniature theatres, drawings and stage designs by the Corriere dei Piccoli illustrator, as well as his colour animated film, described by the municipality as Italy’s first and awarded at the 1942 Venice festival. Palazzo Borea d’Olmo has two marble portals with statues of the Virgin and Child and of Saint John the Baptist by Fra Giovanni da Montorsoli, the Florentine sculptor and pupil of Michelangelo, and for the frescoed salons attributed to Giovanni Battista Merano and Maurizio Carrega.

Context and history

Palazzo Borea d'Olmo grew in stages from a late-medieval core on what is now the Via Matteotti front, taking its baroque form in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and hosting guests from Queen Elisabeth of Spain to Pope Pius VII and Fragonard. The civic collections formed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were long displayed on the palace's second floor, binding the museum's name to the building. In 2016 the municipality moved the museum to Palazzo Nota on Piazza Alberto Nota, the old Genoese commissioner's residence and former town hall, arranging the archaeological section with models and dioramas on the first floor and the pinacoteca and the historic council hall above. The Ministry of Culture’s page continues to associate the museum with Palazzo Borea d’Olmo, while the municipality records Palazzo Nota as the current exhibition site.