Two vaulted rooms below a sixteenth-century palace of the Genoese old town, at a steady seventeen degrees all year: stone columns with reused late Gothic capitals, floors of slate and marble, and the cisterns that once held the water of the house. For years they held a restaurant instead. The restaurant does not appear to be trading any more — local writing from 2024 already calls them the “ex Cantine Squarciafico” — but the cellars, and the piazzetta above them, are still there.
At a glance
- Type
- Cellars and cisterns of a noble palace, long used as a restaurant
- Status
- The restaurant does not appear to be trading; the official site is no longer reachable
- Where
- Piazzetta dell’Amico 2, 16123 Genoa, Liguria
- Coordinates
- 44.4076° N, 8.9302° E
- The building
- Palazzo Squarciafico, also known as Palazzo Invrea or Mascardi — second half of the sixteenth century, on medieval foundations
- Inside
- Two vaulted rooms, stone columns with reused late Gothic capitals, slate and marble floors, a constant 17 °C
Overview
The little square takes its present name from the Invrea, a family of shoemakers probably from Ivrea; before that it was known as piazza Squarciafichi, after the family that gave the Republic pirates, condottieri and doges as well as men of letters. Genoese people had a third name for it, piazza delle animette, after a shop that sold buttons of bone and mother-of-pearl.
The principal building of the square is a sixteenth-century palace raised on earlier medieval property, with a marble portal framed by fluted Doric half-columns. Its undercroft — the cisterns that stored the water, and which some accounts say served as a prison in the Middle Ages — is what the restaurant occupied.
History
The rooms keep the marks of their reuse: the stone columns carry late Gothic capitals that were not made for them but taken from somewhere else, a common Genoese economy in building. The seventeen degrees that the cellars hold on their own, summer and winter, is the reason the house made a point of its wine: no cellar equipment was needed to serve a bottle at the right temperature.
Le Cantine Squarciafico came to national attention on 16 January 2018, in the opening episode of the fourth season of Alessandro Borghese’s 4 Ristoranti on Sky Uno, dedicated to the best restaurant in the caruggi of Genoa. It finished fourth with 89 points, behind the trattoria C’era una volta in vico Casana (105 points and the 5,000-euro prize), Moa Cashmere & Lobster in salita Santa Caterina (103) and 20 Tre in via David Chiossone (100). Of those four addresses, two are no longer in business.
Local writing from 2024 refers to the place as the “ex Cantine Squarciafico”, and the restaurant’s own site no longer answers. We have found no announcement giving a date, and this card does not invent one: what can be said is that the business does not appear to be trading.
What you see
From the square: a marble portal with fluted Doric half-columns and a studded iron door. Around it the piazzetta keeps an eighteenth-century stucco shrine at the corner of the vico — its Madonna and Child long gone — and, at number 8, the remains of a thirteenth or fourteenth-century palace damaged in the bombing of autumn 1942, where friezes of small arches and two-colour voussoirs still show above the later windows.
Practical information
- The restaurant does not appear to be trading: do not travel expecting to eat here.
- The piazzetta is public and always accessible, a few steps from via degli Orefici and the church of San Luca, in the middle of the old town.
Sources
- A Mae Zena — “Affreschi e fresco di Cantine”, on Piazzetta dell’Amico and Palazzo Invrea/Squarciafico: amezena.net
- Mentelocale, 16 January 2018 — scores and competing restaurants of the Genoese episode of 4 Ristoranti.
- Trucioli, 9 May 2024 — “ex Cantine Squarciafico” in a photographic caption on the old town.
- Cultural Heritage Online historical archive — original Italian entry on beniculturalionline.it, verified and rewritten in August 2026.
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