A decade after the end of the Second World War, about forty years ago, the Municipality of the town of Genoa (Genova), the most important port town of Northern Italy on the Mediterranean Sea, decided to renovate some of its wonderful historic buildings, and, among them, Palazzo Rosso. Palazzo Rosso means Red Palace, this name was given to it because of the red colour of its external walls.

The palace was a gift to the town of Genoa and to its people from the French Duchess de Galliera in 1874, to "... increase the dignity and the profit of its inhabitants and its fame with foreigners..." and was used as a public art gallery. Built in the second half of the seventeenth century, following the project by Matteo Lagomaggiore, appointed by the brothers Rodolfo and Gio Francesco Brignole-Sale, the Red Palace is a marvellous example of Genoese Baroque, a Baroque style that explodes in the fluency and transparency of its interiors, of the stairs and of the loggias in the courtyard, just the opposite of the extrovert Roman Baroque, mostly visible from the outside of those buildings. One of its peculiarities is that there are two noble floors, that means two main floors, one on top of the other, meant for the two brothers. It is important to remember that, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Genoese were the most powerful people in the trading field in the whole of Europe and lent money to almost all the kingdoms in the Old Continent.

After the Second World War, Genoa decided to transform the old gallery in a modern museum, able to host not only the gallery of paintings from the Brignole-Sale family itself, but also other important city art collections.

The task was given to architect Franco Albini under the supervision, or, rather, under the managing action of the Chief of the Cultural Heritage Department of the Municipality, Caterina Marcenaro: a woman with such a strong and authoritative personality to deserve the nick-name of czarina for the way she imposed herself and managed the Culture and Arts Departments of the Town of Genoa.

So, Palazzo Rosso underwent substantial restoration works: the exhibition spaces became three times as wide and the exhibition itself showed great innovations, inaugurating the season of what I would like to call the museography of pure-visibilsm. This means, in my opinion, that kind of architectural project for museums that, in the fifties, produced a lot of witnesses of museums and exhibition places where the space and the materials have thinned and the art objects are exhibited in their nudity: let's take, for instance the paintings, often shown without their frames, thought as additional elements not in relation with them, (thinking of what famous architect Adolf Loos, from Vienna, wrote, "ornament is a crime").

This happened also in some of the museum architectures of Albini itself (in Genova other important museums such as the Gallery of Palazzo Bianco (the White Palace), the museum of sculptures of Saint Agostino and the famous one of the Treasure of the Church of Saint Lorenzo), or in some other projects of the same period by the other famous Italian architect Carlo Scarpa.

Looking at some design examples inside the Red Palace, we can see how some canvases are mounted on turning supports, like flags, to better capture natural daylight; then we find the double lamps, where a single body hosts two lights, one above, turned to the vaults'frescoes and one below illuminating the paintings on the walls; or the octagonal staircase, the only new big piece of furniture.

In order to explain the realisation of the project in a simple r6sumd, we can say that, at that time, two guidelines were followed.

One was about the rediscovering of the seventeenth century's architecture and decoration of the Palace, especially on the upper (second) noble floor. This floor underwent several changes troughout the centuries, up to the covering of the courtyard, in glass and concrete, built in 1909. So the architect enables us to read trough the depth of the perspective, from the entrance on the central Via Garibaldi, previously named Via Aurea (the Golden Street), to the inner garden trough the central courtyard and, up along the floors' height, trough the loggias, trough the total transparency of some crystal screens.

The second fundamental element was the enlarging of the exhibition spaces, with the placement on the first noble floor of the big canvases that, because of the restoration of the frescoes of the upper noble floor, couldn't remain there on the walls surfaces anymore.

This exhibition area, wich is extremely functional to the exhibition of guest collections even nowadays, has been recently questioned by Piero Boccardo, Director of the Museum.

Following a recent provision of the law for Italian museums, and according to which ordinary maintenance and reorganization of some areas of the Palace should be done, Mr. Boccardo carried out an accurate historical and critical investigation, and pointed out that Albini's project didn't stop itself at a mere level of restoration, but reached the level of actual making, sometimes even unscrupolously, especially in the spaces of the second noble floor.

This way of working was possible because of the imprinting given by the czarina Caterina Marcenaro, real head of the project, which had a strongly idealistic and Crociana (from the Italian idealistic philosopher Benedetto Croce) matrix.

Going back and reading some of the articles of the magazines of the sixties, it is not by chance that we find out that Mrs. Marcenaro was signaled out as not just the civil servant of the Administration who had to control the work of the project architect, and in charge of the arrangement and the organization of the collections, but she was also seen as the true "director of the restoration and architectural project", while architect Albini appears just as the mere "curator of the architectural project"!

Coming back to the project itself, some of the evaluations seem today really difficult to accept.

For istance, it was said that some frescoes on the longer walls of the southern loggia of the second noble floor were poor later added paintings, and so some arcades were open, the arcades where glass screens are today, destroying the unity of the frescoes themselves, entirely painted also in the second half of the seventeenth century too, just ten years after the construction of the building.

For other gaps of the second noble floor it was said that the disposition of the paintings, of the period before the Second World War itself, dated back only to the second half of nineteenth century and that, before those years, paintings were placed also on the first noble floor.

At the same time some squaring decoration of the walls, defined as "mediocre", was dated back to the nineteenth century, when there should have been also some from the seventeenth century- so some of these decorations had been destroyed.

The main idea of restoring the palace and bringing it back to its "original" architectural style turned into a real obsession, whose outcome was the opening of gaps where there had been frescoes and the closing of other ones with the making of brand new decorations.

These makings, carried out by extremely skillful local craftsmen, were methodically denied and they were directly the cause which determined some evaluation errors by art historians about the "presumed" frescoes that had not been painted in the seventeenth, nor in the eighteenth, nor in the nineteenth, but in the twentieth century !

It is possible to point out a few other wrong interpretations in the displaying of the collection, where some partial elements, torn away from their contextual place, were elevated in an idealistic way at the high rank of masterpieces, and other objects, less considered, that were relegated to the store-houses, separating some art objects and making it very difficult to critically judge them.

An important example is the big mirror by Filippo Parodi- some elements of this mirror were removed, showing the mirror itself in a limited exhibition; this was probably done for a definite aesthetical value, but it was also done disavowing a lot of other values that modern museology is not allowed to forget.

So, this makes us consider and understand how, after a hard and difficult historical period like that of a World War, the rebuilding of museums, even if highly celebrated like the one of Palazzo Rosso of Genova, can hide mistakes, even if they were made with a good purpose in mind.

In this case, for example the restoring of the museum to its original spiendour made several errors that modern museology, so careful in avoiding every decontextualisation, should never do.