Albertis Castle

Monte Galletto — the mount of the broom, in the local reading of the name — was bare, treeless ground in the parish of San Tommaso, carrying Genoa's medieval wall circuit, which closed off the sestiere of Prè on the uphill side. The circuit's square-plan tower was replaced in the sixteenth century by a bastion raised over the older tower's base. Those walls are the mura trecentesche, the fourteenth-century circuit, though the fortified site under the castle is also dated to the thirteenth century.

In 1747 the people of Genoa dragged cannon up the Pietraminuta ascent to these walls, guns "meant to make the [Austrian] enemy beat the retreat", as an anonymous chronicler recorded in the supplement to Il Caffaro of 1 May 1892 — proof, he wrote, that "strategically too, this height has always been a point of great importance".

The sea captain Enrico Alberto d'Albertis had the castle raised from 1886 as his own residence and devised it himself, with a taste for architectural collage that mixed Aosta Valley castles and Florentine palaces. The prevailing manner is nineteenth-century Gothic Revival, and the detail is quoted from Genoa's own medieval buildings, among them the Embriaci tower and the mullioned windows of the Palazzo San Giorgio. The engineers Graziani and Francesco Parodi built it, with the sculptors Allegro and Marc'Aurelio Crotta on the decorative work, under the supervision of the architect Alfredo d'Andrade.

D'Albertis built on the remains of the old fortifications, incorporating and preserving the foundations of the bastion and one of the turrets. The work ran from 1886 to 1892, and the inauguration was timed to coincide with the celebrations of four hundred years since Columbus's landfall in America. It was the first villa-castle built in Genoa, and from the hill in the Castelletto district it looks over the city to the Ligurian Sea.

On his death in 1932 d'Albertis left the castle and its collections to the city of Genoa: the house itself, furnished with exotic, Gothic Revival and Hispano-Moresque references; the ethnographic material gathered on his many voyages; and the sixteenth-century bastion of the city wall, with the base of the earlier medieval tower inside it, on which the whole building rests.

Years of semi-abandonment followed. Through the 1970s the park was put to use in summer as a cafe chantant, in the wake of the Roman evenings at Massenzio.

The castle was then given a close programme of building restoration to fit it for modern public use. At the geometric apex of the bastion the roof covering was replaced with a glass structure, and the sixteenth-century bastion was emptied of the earth packed into it, freeing the masonry within; that gained new exhibition space and brought the fourteenth-century remains, the sober spatial character of the Renaissance work and, above, the nineteenth-century battlements and tower into a single view.

The Museo delle Culture del Mondo, the Museum of World Cultures, was inaugurated in the castle in 2004. Its holdings are the ethnographic and archaeological material brought back by Enrico and Luigi Maria d'Albertis from Africa, the Americas from Canada to Tierra del Fuego, New Guinea and Oceania — weapons from Sudan and the Zambesi, Chinese spears and European halberds, Maya finds from Honduras, models of ships and yachts, nautical instruments and the captain's own library. A separate section, the Museo delle Musiche dei Popoli, holds musical instruments from across the world. The castle is the property of the city of Genoa and carries Italian national heritage designation.

Two legends attach to the building. One holds that a door kept always locked by those who run the castle now and then bangs violently open, always at night, obliging the custodians to go back and lock it again. The other has it that the captain had a tunnel dug from his rooms straight down to the port and his ship, against the need for a sudden escape, and that the resistance used it during the Second World War.