Palazzo Reale is a large palace constructed, enlarged over the years and splendidly decorated not only by the House of Savoy in the 19th century but also by two great Genoese patrician families, the Balbi, who built it between 1643 and 1650, and the Durazzo, who expanded it in the late 17th and early 18th century.

It may be the largest Genoese palace of the 17th–18th century to have preserved its reception rooms intact complete with decorations, frescoes, paintings, sculptures, furnishings and fittings.

While the ceilings are frescoed by some of the greatest names in Baroque and Rococo decorative art, the over 200 paintings hanging on the two main floors include works by some of the leading Genoese 17th-century artists as well as masterpieces by the Bassano family, Domenico Tintoretto, Luca Giordano, Van Dyck, Ferdinand Voet and Guercino.

In Genoa that November day, leaving the station and seeing the Hotel Salgari, which is gold and green like a tropical forest, immediately made me feel like I was standing next to the Black Corsair. The ink-coloured waves had not yet begun to roll, but I must have felt a little like a pirate just then, to be able to reconstruct a map that leads to hidden treasure, an open chest at the end of an adventure I was yet to imagine. First, I would have to lose myself behind doors and screens, in distant rooms and on vanished terraces if I was to find the Royal Palace’s dual soul, reflected both in the gold-framed mirrors and upside-down in the nymphaeum’s cloudy waters. Then I found it, my story, at the end of a race that had no beginning. All of which is contained in the comics book you now hold in your hands!

Filippo Parodi The artist captures in marble the instant in which the nymph Clytie is transformed into a heliotrope. Gilded highlights mark the petals of a flower against the whiteness of the stone, which Parodi handles with almost pictorial sensitivity. The subject, drawn from the fourth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses, is the dramatic tale of the nymph's love for Helios and how her body was transformed into the stem, her arms into the leaves and her face into the flower of the heliotrope, the plant that always turns towards the sun as though in adoration

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino Combining the qualities of an ancient sorceress, a gipsy and a commoner, this young woman with the visionary expression is identified by the inscription on the edge of book In her right hand as the Samian Sybil, one of the twelve recognized by the Western Church as prophets of the coming of Christ. She is supposed to have lived around 700 BCE on the Greek island of Samos.

Antoon van Dyck The woman portrayed in the centre of the canvas with a red rose beside her face, a splendid dress and her hair in a chignon adorned with diamonds and black feathers is Caterina Balbi Durazzo. The 25-year-old artist Antoon van Dyck succeeds in capturing her essential qualities of aristocratic distinction together with a touch of fresh and youthful tenderness. The painting entered the palace on via Balbi in 1689 and has been there ever since.

Luca Giordano With its wealth of theatrical inventions and effects, this imposing composition by Luca Giordano, signed on the first step in the bottom left, shows one of the key episodes in the myth of Perseus, the son of Zeus and Danae, who rescued and married Andromeda. She had, however, been previously betrothed to Phineus, who sought revenge in an attack on the wedding feast with a group of warriors. In order to defend himself, Perseus showed them the head of Medusa the Gorgon and turned them to stone.