Genoa did not have a public residence of representation adequate to host the representatives of foreign powers. In the modern age, therefore, the system of rolli is established, that is, lists of particularly luxurious private mansions that the government required to house popes, emperors, kings, princes and foreign ambassadors visiting the Republic. On the basis of the beauty, width and accessibility of the structure and the prestige of the owner family, the residences were divided into different areas, from which they were drawn by lot according to the rank of the people to host. Five documents (1576, 1588, 1599, 1614 and 1664) have been identified by Ennio Poleggi in his studies on this unique public hospitality system, but further research has helped the identification of other papers, which cover a period that goes from 1510 to 1739. The acts are extremely lean and dry, very distant from the splendour and richness of the buildings listed there, which were capable of evoking the interest and astonishment of personalities such as Rubens, who specifically came to Genoa to draw and describe them.

The Casa delle Compere e dei Banchi di San Giorgio is perhaps the best-known Genoese institution in the world: between 1407 and 1805 it combined some prerogatives of the state (public debt, taxation, territorial sovereignty) with the exercise of a financial activity started in 1408. San Giorgio thus became the first example of a public bank in Europe, with officials hired through competition who carried out deposit, transfer and credit operations by administering the current accounts of the Genoese. The archive therefore preserves documentation relating to taxation, management of territorial possessions such as Corsica or Sarzana, customs records and current accounts, testifying to the extreme variety of skills acquired over time by this institution. In banking, ledgers record customer transactions as they appear before the scribe to dispose of their money. The operations are recorded in double entry: an accounting system that sees in Genoa the oldest known use in public accounting, with the first register of the massaria of the Ancient Municipality in 1340.

The State Archives of Genoa preserves the largest Genoese collection of documents relating to Christopher Columbus, almost two hundred according to the list compiled by Aldo Agosto in the publication on the occasion of the Colombian celebrations of 1992. They contain references to the apprenticeship of the explorer and to his relations with the city of origin, before and after the discovery of America. In this letter, the Protectors of the House of San Giorgio respond to the Admiral, congratulating him on the discovery and promising to favour his son Diego for every need. The status of fellow citizen is underlined, pointing out how Columbus demonstrates that he is "fond of his homeland", to which he demonstrates a "unique love and generosity". On the other hand, in his letter of April 1502, the explorer had stated: "although my body is here, my heart is always with you".

In 1313 was established the extraordinary magistracy of the "Eight wise men in charge of the questions of the Black Sea, Gazaria (= Crimea) and Persia and navigation beyond Sicily", or more simply Officium Gazarie, with the task of legislating and maintaining judicial control on navigation to the East and the Black Sea, the Western Mediterranean and the Atlantic and to organise the commercial settlements in Crimea. The rules issued by the judiciary were brought together by Doge Simone Boccanegra in 1340 in a single corpus, making it a real international navigation code. It establishes measures, loading capacity (freeboard), on-board rigging, crew of boats; obligations of the captain; provisions on caravan navigation along the Eastern and Western routes; rules for the organisation and governance of the colonies in the Aegean and the Black Sea. The manuscript has the full-page text and the columns in red and the coeval leather binding and wooden plates are perfectly preserved.

The State Archives of Genoa remained the only archive in the world to preserve original Byzantine documents from the twelfth century. The second half of the century was particularly turbulent for relations between Genoa and Byzantium. Raids and looting hit on several occasions the embolus of Santa Croce, the settlement area of the Genoese in Constantinople, as well as the other Latin settlements in the city. The Genoese respond with the raids of the pirate Gafforio and other privateers against the coasts and islands of the Aegean islands. In 1199, Emperor Alexis III Angelo Comneno sent this basilikòn ("royal writing") to resume diplomatic relations. This type of letter is the main tool used by the Byzantine chancellery for the care of international relations with the West. Between the Greek text and its Latin translation, the emperor affixed with his own hand and with red ink, obtained with cinnabar and the use of which was reserved only for him, the date (menologue) which was valid as a signature. Following this gesture by the Byzantine emperor, Ambassador Nicolò Medico in 1201 obtained the allocation of a new neighbourhood for the Genoese.

The expedition against Almeria and Tortosa of 1147-1148 turns out to be extremely expensive for the Genoese, enough to cause a serious financial crisis. As early as 1149, a reconciliation with the Islamic kingdoms of the western Mediterranean was sought, in particular with the Emir Abu-Abd-Allah Muhammad ibn Said ben Mardanish, called King Wolf in Latin sources. In 1188, Ambassador Nicola Leccanozze signed a twenty-year agreement with a strong commercial content with Abd-Allah, son and successor of King Wolf. Faced with the commitment not to damage the sovereign's lands, not to lend assistance to his enemies and to defend his subjects by land and sea, the Genoese obtain the promise of protection of the territories under their jurisdiction, exemption from customs duties, the protection of ships even in the case of a shipwreck, the concession wherever they wanted of a warehouse, an oven, access to a bathroom once a week and a church for the celebration of their rituals. The privileges of 1181 and 1188 preserved in the Genoa State Archives are the only ones left among those issued from the Banū Gāniya dynasty. The Arabic text is interlined by the Latin translation and thus testifies the meeting of the two diplomacies in the varied cultural panorama of the medieval Mediterranean.

Since 1146 we have news of a registrum Comunis, in which were transcribed the most important documents for the administration, politics and trade of Genoa. The existence of a corpus of documentation of major interest for the Municipality of Genoa is already testified by a consular award in 1146. In a subsequent period, the drafting of other collections is attested, such as the corpus of documentation relating to foreign relations carried out in 1229 thanks to the Bolognese Chief Magistrate Iacopo Baldovini, a jurist. A copy of these oldest compilations, now lost, was made starting from 1253 with the Vetustior register; the drafting of the 9 codes of the Libri Iurium continued until the 17th century. The volumes are large and of particular value, demonstrating the importance that is attached to the collection. Duplicatum, together with Liber A, now preserved by the University Library of Genoa, represents the richest collection. This page transcribes the inscription in gold letters that the Genoese had placed in 1105 on the architrave of the altar of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, listing the privileges received in the Holy Land after the first crusade. 

The register of Giovanni Scriba is not only the oldest existing notarial register, but also the oldest paper code in Western Europe. It represents the testimony of the activities and daily life of the inhabitants of a merchant city, Genoa, which was opening up more and more to the Mediterranean. Not by chance, some loose sheets attached are of Arabic manufacture and bear a text perhaps written by the Egyptian chancellery, according to the hypothesis of Michele Amari. The manuscript opens the long series of notaries, which counts 7 cartularies from the 12th century, 150 from the 13th century registers, 420 from the 14th century and over a thousand from the 15th century files, for a total of 1630 notarial archival units of the medieval period.
 

In 1921 Anton Giulio Bragaglia commissioned Virgilio Marchi to build the new headquarters of his House of Art with an adjoining theatre, by recovering the ancient baths attributed to Septimius Severus in Avignonesi street in Rome. "... the game of the vaults, launched in bizarre clashes on the pillars and arches of these so different and amazing basilicas, effortlessly reminded me of the escapes and whims of Futurist architecture" (A. G. Bragaglia). In the sketch you can see what Bragaglia called "a graceful balcony of eighteenth-century taste". “The stage was built in opening sections. Above the stage, the latticework of the attic room was kept over the eighth meter high, with the shots to perfection. The fragments of the scenes came out from the side and under the stage. The dressing rooms were obtained in ancient tunnels on the left. The room, including the circular balcony, had two hundred seats and many standing. " (A. G. Bragaglia). “The Bragaglia theater is so new to be new; there is nothing to say. Consider that, if the ancient theater was outdoors, it is underground; and that, if the former was concerned with ensuring the visibility of the stage for all spectators, this is designed so that the stage can be seen from almost nowhere in the hall. I attended the first issue of the program - Hedge in the north-west, comedy and music by Massimo Bontempelli - from the gallery, in a strategic point that had been recommended to me as a position that offers a good view. Because the underground hall is occupied, in the center, by a huge pylon, which prohibits the spectators on the right from looking to the left, those on the left from looking to the right. As for those in the gallery, I will say that by combining the effects of the sinuosity of the balcony with the presence of the inexorable pylon, they can be satisfied if they can see certain areas of the scene. But that doesn't hurt; on the contrary, it increases surprises, stimulates curiosity, gives a sense of the unpredictable and conquered to what one manages to grasp" (Silvio d’Amico).

In the photograph, the costume for Medea by Ernest Legouvé designed by the painter Ary Scheffer, around 1856. The "Fondo Ristori" includes fifteen complete costumes and also: thirty pieces of clothing (scarves, veils, skirts, corsets, caps, etc.), six fans, twenty pairs of shoes, stage jewels. It is a complex that allows us to evaluate the 'historical' habits of the nineteenth century and in one of its greatest expressions. Some of them - such as Marie Antoinette's costume, made by the greatest tailor of the time, the Parisian Worth, inventor of the crinoline - were made outside Italy, in Paris and London. Medea's costume was designed by the painter Ary Scheffer, considered the leader of the Dutch romantics; those for Elisabetta by Delphine Baron, fashion designer of the Paris Opera House. Adelaide Ristori (1822-1906), daughter of poor actors, appeared on the scene around the 1940s, when the conditions of the Italian dramatic actor were among the poorest in Europe. After a first experience in the Royal Sardinian Company and subsequently with others, from 1853 to 1856 she returned to the Royal Sardinian as the absolute first actress with a fabulous writing. In the meantime she married the Marquis Giuliano Capranica del Grillo (son of Bartolomeo and Princess Flaminia Odescalchi), far from fasting theatrical enterprises: the Capranica family then owned two Roman theaters: the Capranica and the Valle. Giuliano will in fact become the oculate administrator and 'manager' of Adelaide, the first (and perhaps only?) "Actress-marquise" in history. In 1855 the Ristori, already famous in her homeland, obtained the Parisian consecration and began (first among the Italians after the Commedia dell’Arte season) an international career, exploiting her notoriety also because of the Italian Risorgimento. After Paris it is the turn of Berlin, Vienna, London, Madrid. In 1860 she made her first tour in Russia. In 1866 she crossed the Atlantic and went to the United States (the President of the United States received her in his private apartment in the White House as the greatest contemporary actress); in 1869 in South America; in April 1874 she even begins a world tour that would end in January 1876, touching cities never visited by any Italian Drama Company.