The Venue
Imperiale Palace Hotel
Built in 1889, it was a villa owned by the noble Costa family, originally from Corsica, and remained so until 1905, when a wing was added to serve as a hotel.
Expanded to its current size in 1910, the hotel welcomed the crowned heads and aristocracy of the Belle Epoque.
Queen Elena of Savoy spent long periods in one of the Imperial Suites and the greatest names in culture and entertainment, from Pirandello to Eleonora Duse, assiduously stayed in the festive suites on the main floor, bringing it back to the splendor of a time now distant.
On 16 April 1922, surprising the international press and the participants of the Economic Conference in Genoa, the Treaty of Rapallo was signed in the oval hall, today known as the “Treaty Hall”, between the German Foreign Minister Walther von Rathenau and the Soviet Foreign Commissioner Georgij Vasilevic Cicerin, establishing a separate peace between Russia and Germany and the end, also at a diplomatic level, of the First World War.
