Rolli Days - 2016 Editions

Via Garibaldi, the "Strada Nuova" (New Street) dating to the mid-16th century, is also known as "la Via Aurea" (the Golden Street). With its beautiful palaces, it boasts some of the world’s most fascinating architecture. Opened after 1550, to gather the city's most important families into a single setting, it was originally called "Via Aurea" due to the splendour of its buildings, and then “via nuova delli palazzi” (the new street of palaces) until, at the end of the 1800s, the city decided to name it after Italy's national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi.

The road represents a complex anthology that reiterates, in a Renaissance style and on a scale of particular grandeur, the enduring private entrepreneurship that can be seen in medieval Genoa's most distant origins and for which the city's leading families traditionally strived to group together in neighbourhoods that were ever more impressive in terms of splendour and architectural grandeur. Rubens was so struck by these palaces and their modern appearance that he assembled them in a volume of drawings to serve as examples for the important families of Antwerp.

Today the 14 buildings are home to the Town Hall, major banks, clubs, cultural groups, antique dealers, shops and public and private offices. Via Garibaldi is an ideal place to begin a visit to the Old Town, the largest in Italy and Europe after the historic centre of Venice, which has remained intact to this day.

The "Strade Nuove" (New Streets, comprising Via Garibaldi, Via Cairoli, and Via Balbi) form an urban layout composed mainly of two modern-age residential roads, created by the grandest families of the aristocracy, who built their dwellings on the edge of the historic centre in two consecutive periods (in the 16th and 17th centuries).

On 13 July 2006, the "Strade Nuove" were recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, together with the "Palazzi dei Rolli". The uniform urban layout of these splendid roads and the architectural features of the noble buildings make them an outstanding model of urban development parcelled out within a single framework that remains to this day in the heart of the city, linking the medieval streets to the south with the contemporary traffic structures to the north and forming the finest stretch of the 16th/17th-century circle.