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Palazzo del Tribunale, Finalborgo

Palazzo del Tribunale, Finalborgo historical timeline

Last updated on October 19, 2026

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This is the building the Marquisate of Finale was run from, and it outlasted the state it served by two and a half centuries. It stood before the Del Carretto were at their height, was rebuilt when they were, kept working as a courthouse under the Habsburgs and then under Genoa, and was refitted one last time by a Genoese governor eleven years before the whole feudal order was abolished. What survives is the front of it, with the fifteenth century still painted on.

Chronology

early 1300s The palace is already standing — the record puts its existence at least this early, without giving a foundation date. It is the seat of the Del Carretto government.
1462 The marquis Giovanni I Del Carretto restructures it and entrusts the recovery project to Giorgio Molinari, who modifies both interiors and exteriors with a new staircase and the opening of intermediated bifore. Those windows are still in the facade.
1400s The facade receives the typical pictorial decorations of the century that are still on it, and that make it a document of fifteenth-century painting as much as of fifteenth-century building.
1602 Del Carretto rule ends after four centuries and the marquisate passes under Habsburg domination. The palace carries on as the judicial and administrative centre under the new power.
1627 Governor Diaz de Zamorano leaves a dedicatory inscription on the painting in the palace's internal chapel, before which the Finale magistracies swore their oath. It is the only dated object from inside this building that survives anywhere.
1713 The marquisate is ceded to the Genoese and Finalborgo loses importance. The courts stay where they are.
1781 The internal spaces are revisited, with the interest of governor Giovanni Benedetto Centurione of the Republic of Genoa. It is the last documented work on the building.
1797 Feudal legislation is cancelled and the Ligurian Republic instituted. The marquisate that this palace administered ceases to exist as a legal thing.
1805 The painting from the palace's chapel is among the works that end up in San Biagio, where it hangs in the chapel to the left of the presbytery.

What a governing building leaves when the government goes

Finalborgo's administrative life ended in stages and the palace recorded each of them. The Del Carretto built it up in 1462; the Habsburgs inherited a working courthouse in 1602; Genoa took it in 1713 and refitted its rooms in 1781; and in 1797 the feudal legislation it existed to apply was abolished. The town's municipal functions later moved to Palazzo Ricci, which was the seat of the comune of Finalborgo from about 1863 until the 1927 merger into Finale Ligure. What is left of this one is the thing that could not be moved: a facade where the fifteenth-century painting and the traces of every later intervention are both still legible, which is precisely why the record calls it of great interest.

Verified against Wikipedia, October 2026.

External resources

Wikipedia

Sources & verification Covers the sourced claims on this page.

Checked against Wikipedia — Among the religious architecture of Finalborgo: the basilica collegiata di San Biagio -- the present parish building, the third, built in the seventeenth century to a design by the Finale architect Andrea Storace, containing important sculptures by Pasquale Bocciardo and his brother Domenico, and interesting pictorial works among them the Martirio di Santa Caterina by Oddone Pascale and the Madonna delle rose by Vincenzo Tamagni, and in which is kept the mausoleum of the last descendant of the Carretto family, Giovanni Andrea Sforza Del Carretto; the conventual complex of Santa Caterina, founded in 1359 and subsequently completed with the addition of two fine Renaissance cloisters, today the seat of the civic museum, in whose adjacent conventual church, now transformed into an auditorium, are fifteenth-century frescoes; and the chiesa di San Giuseppe Calasanzio, outside the walls of the borgo. Among the civil architecture: the Palazzo del Tribunale, formerly the seat of the Del Carretto government and later the judicial and administrative centre of the Marquisate of Finale, existing at least from the early years of the fourteenth century, restructured by the marquis Giovanni I Del Carretto in 1462 who entrusted the recovery project to Giorgio Molinari, the latter modifying both interiors and exteriors with the construction of a new staircase and the opening of intermediated bifore, the palace being revisited again internally in 1781 with the interest of governor Giovanni Benedetto Centurione of the Republic of Genoa, its facade of great interest for the presence both of typical fifteenth-century pictorial decorations and of traces of all the subsequent interventions; Palazzo Ricci, a Renaissance building in front of the former church of the Santa Caterina complex, which is said to have been the palace of the powerful cardinal Carlo Domenico Del Carretto, acquired and restructured in 1528 by the noble Ricci family and subsequently, from about 1863 to 1927, the seat of the comune of Finalborgo; Palazzo Cavasola, an ancient Carretto palace, the "casa della Camera", which at the end of the sixteenth century was donated to Erasmo Cavasola by the marquis Alessandro Del Carretto, notably restructured in the eighteenth century, with a facade with rococo decorations and a majestic slate portal; and Palazzo Brunenghi, a medieval building in whose portico the pillory was placed., Between 1142 and 1148 the marquis Enrico I Del Carretto, called il Guercio, inherited from his father Bonifacio del Vasto the territory of the march of Savona, of which he obtained the investiture from Frederick Barbarossa on 10 June 1162. While the comuni of Savona and Noli were making themselves independent, Enrico's domains were divided between his two sons. Towards the end of the twelfth century Enrico II Del Carretto began to use the title of marquis of Finale and girded the urban nucleus with walls, giving origin to the "burgus Finarii", today's Finalborgo. The Del Carretto family would govern the Marquisate of Finale until 1602. The town then passed under Habsburg domination until 1713. In this period the marquisate of Finale is an indispensable staging post for transferring Spanish troops into the Milanese domains without having to ask the permission of Genoa, and for carrying goods without paying tolls; Finale therefore has a great economic and artistic development. With the extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs the marquisate of Finale was ceded to the Genoese, and Finalborgo lost importance. The Republic of Genoa held the marquisate of Finale in fief with varying fortunes until 1797, when feudal legislation was cancelled and the Ligurian Republic instituted. Finale was then incorporated first into the Ligurian Republic and then into the Napoleonic French Empire, under which the rioni of Borgo, Pia and Marina were temporarily reunited in a single administration and inserted into the newly constituted Dipartimento di Montenotte. After the Restoration the Ligurian republic passed to the Kingdom of Sardinia in 1814 and then, after the unification of Italy, to the Kingdom of Italy from 1861. In 1877 the suppressed comune of Perti was aggregated to the comune of Finalborgo. Finalborgo remained an autonomous comune until 1927., In the first altar of the right nave of San Biagio is the triptych of the Mystic Marriage of saint Catherine of Alexandria, among her witnesses san Gottardo and san Sebastiano, ascribable to the school of Bernardino Fasolo and made for the Confraternita dei Disciplinanti of the convent of Santa Caterina, transported into San Biagio on the occasion of the unification of the conventual confraternity with that of San Biagio, which took place in 1626; a rich frame decorated at the base was then added, and san Gottardo was modified into san Biagio by the addition of a carder's comb in his hand. In the second altar is the monumental altarpiece representing the Martyrdom of saint Catherine with san Domenico, san Pietro, san Paolo, the Annunciation and the Pieta, by the Piedmontese painter Pascale Oddone (1533), a work coming from the high altar of Santa Caterina; the episcopal arms at the top and the Carretto arms indicate the donor, whom G. Castelnovi identified as Luigi Del Carretto, count and bishop of Cahors, who however died in 1524, so that it would be his nephew Paolo Del Carretto, who held the same offices from 1525. At the third altar is a wooden crucifix by Francesco Agnesi called il Corsetto (1693), previously placed behind the high altar and moved here without its decorations in 1949. At the fourth altar, seat of the old eighteenth-century organ, is a canvas dedicated to san Giovanni Nepomuceno, patron of Bohemia, between the saints Francesco da Paola and Lucia among angels, the work of Giuseppe Paganelli da Bergamo of 1798; this saint, protector against floods, is also represented on the internal surface of Porta Testa, from which the waters of a sudden flooding would potentially burst in. At the fifth and last right altar is the canvas of the Madonna delle Grazie among the souls in purgatory, the work of Pier Lorenzo Spoleti of 1723, positioned on a support perhaps made by Pietro Ripa between 1718 and 1728, with columns faced in marble, comprising material reused from the nearby site of Castel Gavone. On the walls of the presbytery are copies of Raphael's Transfiguration and of the Assumption of the Virgin by the Fleming Peter Paul Rubens, made by the Finale painter Pier Lorenzo Spoleti in 1722; under the latter picture is conserved a marble ciborium of 1521 by the sculptor Giovanni Lorenzo Sormano. The wooden walnut choir was completed in 1721 by the master Gio Benedetto Mora. Of particular interest is the pipe organ, built by Gioacchino Concone in 1784 and reformed by the Savonese Giovanni Battista Dessiglioli in 1894. In the left nave, the panel of the Madonna delle Rose, already from the convent of Santa Caterina, in which the saint, a king's daughter, presents the marquis of Finale Alfonso I del Carretto while san Domenico presents his brother, the cardinal Carlo Domenico; the work, later than the disappearance of the two figures (1517), has been attributed to Vincenzo Tamagni, a painter originally from San Gimignano who, after moving to Rome in the middle of the sixteenth century, worked on the papal commissions of the Vatican Loggias beside Raphael., The new church of San Biagio was enriched with paintings and statues and decorated from the Baroque-Rococo period onward. A good part of its present furnishings, however, comes from the conventual complex of Santa Caterina, the "superga" of the Del Carretto, which was confiscated first by Napoleon Bonaparte during the Ligurian Republic and then by the Italian government in 1864 for civil uses. The walls were subsequently frescoed and stuccoed thanks to the work, in 1878, of the painters Francesco Semino and Domenico Buscaglia -- frescoes of the dome and of the presbytery vault -- resumed in 1911 by Luigi Gainotti and Antonio Bertolotto in the vault. Above the middle portal can be admired the funerary monument of Sforza Andrea Del Carretto, last marquis of the Carretto family, a work commissioned by his heir Giovan Andrea Doria and transported into San Biagio only in 1805, when the church of Santa Caterina was confiscated by Napoleon Bonaparte and used to billet troops; the statue is the work of Battista Orsolino, of the sculptural school of Taddeo Carlone. To the left of the portal is the baptismal font; the basin and the balustrades were made by Girolamo Bocciardo in 1798, while the statues of Gesu Cristo and San Giovanni Battista are a neoclassical work of 1811, the first and only work in marble by a sculptor in wood, the Genoese Angelo Olivari. To Girolamo's father, Pasquale Bocciardo, is attributed the curious and fanciful marble pulpit of 1764-1765, in which he carved the Vision of Ezekiel with the divine chariot and the tetramorphs. In the presbytery, the marble balustrade with angels is the work of Pasquale Bocciardo, in which four figures of angels support the cloth decorated with fine burin work; Pasquale Bocciardo is also the author of the high altar of 1799, during whose making he was helped by his uncle Andrea Casareggio, with whom he shared the workshop in via Giulia in Genoa. The famous peculiarity of this altar is the drape of the table, which seems to be of embroidered cloth but is in reality pure marble. (October 2026).

Palazzo del Tribunale, Finalborgo historical timeline

Chronology

What a governing building leaves when the government goes

External resources

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