Palazzo Gentili di Rovellone

This palace is an architectural puzzle, its irregular, composite form shaped less by a single grand design than by centuries of pragmatic accretion. A public passageway, swallowed whole into the building’s volume, runs straight through its core. The perimeter walls are partly discontinuous, opening onto the street as a row of brick pillars supporting porticos. The logic is piecemeal: the portico ceilings are a mixed bag of cross vaults, lunette barrel vaults, and flat wooden soffits, suggesting different building campaigns or uses. Inside, the ground-floor commercial spaces have lowered ceilings, while the entrance hall retains its original flat plane. The brick-vaulted passage gives way to the piano nobile, where the salons are adorned with decorated ceilings. The attic storey, by contrast, uses humble camorcanna (reed-and-plaster) ceilings. Above it all, a composite roof of terracotta tiles. An honest palimpsest of a building, where what you see is a history of adaptation, not a pristine original.

Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.