Italy · Liguria · Genoa
Granarolo, Genoa — Area Guide & Where to Stay
Granarolo is a hillside quarter of Genoa above the Lagaccio, beside the parco del Peralto, reached by the Principe to Granarolo rack railway.
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Where to stay in Granarolo
Where visitors usually base themselves, and why.
The rack railway is the way up. The Principe to Granarolo line still climbs from the station, and roads opened after the war connect the quarter down to San Teodoro, where before there was only the steep brick ramp of the Salita Granarolo. What you get is the view.
From the old borgo the whole of Genoa opens out, with Oregina across the slope and the Lagaccio directly below, which is the reason to climb up here rather than stay down by the port. Rooms are down in the city.
About Granarolo
What are the main landmarks in Granarolo?
The walls run just above the old village. Between 1626 and 1632 the republic built the Mura Nuove along the ridge that divides Genoa from the Val Polcevera, and opened the Porta di Granarolo in them on the road down into the valley. More military work followed for centuries.
The last of it was a battery raised in 1889 to cover the port, and a radio station installed under the fascist government stood here too. One broadcast from it is remembered. On the morning of 26 April 1945 the partisan commander known as Pittaluga, in life Paolo Emilio Taviani, announced from this station that the German garrison holding Genoa had surrendered.
What is the history of Granarolo?
The name is half explained. Tradition takes Granarolo from the Airolo family, who held land here, with a Gran prefix nobody has documented properly, and the settlement itself was an old farming borgo and a summer place for well-off Genoese. It sat on a medieval road.
The way from the old Porta di San Tomaso ran through here toward the Val Polcevera, and although the whole San Teodoro area always belonged to the comune of Genoa it lay outside the city walls until the 17th century. Vines and vegetables held the ground into the last century. Where the modern quarter stands there were only orchards and vineyards until the middle of the twentieth century, their produce sold by local farmers in the market on piazza Di Negro, and the building boom after the war filled the slope.
One house carries a plaque. It went up at Salita Granarolo 110 on 19 September 2021, on the birthplace of Aldo Gastaldi, in the centenary year of the man called the first partisan of Italy.
Where is Granarolo?
Granarolo sits on the hill above the Lagaccio and beside the parco del Peralto, inside the Municipio II Centro Ovest of Genoa, on the ridge that separates the city from the Val Polcevera.
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More areas in Genoa
Updated September 2026