Palazzo del Comune e Loggia della Repubblica, Noli site features

The seaward face is the one to read. On the facade towards the sea promenade are, besides the restored sundial, four ogival polifore — multi-light windows with pointed heads — partly blind and partly of restoration.

The tower is part of the palace, not a separate building. The medieval Palazzo del Comune carries its civic tower, and the two together are what rise above the portico.

The council chamber is seventeenth-century and holds older fragments. Inside the Sala del Consiglio, of the seventeenth century, are conserved fragments of late-medieval fresco cycles — and they did not originate here: they come from the porta di San Giovanni, one of the town gates.

The loggia is contemporary with the palace and carries the town's memory. The Loggia della Repubblica Nolese stands near the palazzo and dates to the same period. A column there has a bugnato capital, an element typical of the end of the Trecento and the beginning of the Quattrocento.

And under it are the plaques. Several attest the passage of various personalities: Dante Alighieri, with the citation of Noli in the Purgatorio of the Divina Commedia; Cristoforo Colombo on 31 May 1476, departing for Portugal; and Giordano Bruno in 1576.

A few steps away a palace was built around a tower. Palazzo Viale-Salvarezza, seventeenth-century, was fused among pre-existing medieval buildings and raised around the twelfth-century torre della Marina and a second, smaller one.

The seat of the consuls

This was the seat of the consuls and of the government of the Republic of Noli — an oligarchic republic headed by a Podestà, with a Consiglio dei Consoli e dei Capi di casa as its deliberative organ, which obtained its own diocese and traded with Byzantium, France, Spain and England.

Three plaques under the loggia

Dante Alighieri, tied to the citation of Noli in the Purgatorio; Cristoforo Colombo, dated 31 May 1476, in partenza per il Portogallo; and Giordano Bruno, dated 1576. For a town of this size, an unusually well-kept visitors' book.

Four ogival polifore and a sundial

On the facade towards the sea promenade, four ogival polifore — partly blind, partly of restoration — alongside the restored meridiana. The blind ones are as informative as the open ones: a civic palace that was altered and then partly put back.

Frescoes that came from a town gate

The seventeenth-century Sala del Consiglio keeps fragments of late-medieval fresco cycles brought from the porta di San Giovanni. Salvaging painting from a gate into a council chamber is a very specific act of civic preservation.

A bugnato capital of the late Trecento

The column under the loggia carries a capital a bugnato, an element the record calls typical of the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century — which is what dates the loggia alongside the palace.

Transformed as soon as the republic ended

The palazzo underwent various transformations between 1797 and 1820 — that is, in the two decades immediately after 2 December 1797, when the state it had housed ceased to exist.

A neighbouring palace with a cannonball in it

Palazzo Viale-Salvarezza was built around the twelfth-century torre della Marina for Antonio Viale, the Genoese senator sent in 1643 to break a plot to hand Noli to the Duke of Savoy. Until recent restorations its facade still held a cannonball fired by the brig Wizard in the bombardment of 1808.