Palazzo Damiani is located in the historic center of Pontremoli in Contrada San Giacomo, right in front of the Church. The typology is presented in two parts, organized by two parallel systems: entrance hall, porticoed courtyard, staircase, loggias on the various floors. […] The four types of finishing of the windows, on the facade, constitute different elaborations of the same frame and present, among others, unusual and grotesque mask decorations. The eight street openings on the ground floor do not correspond to the upper openings; the facade ends with a cornice with oculi. The sequence street-hallway-courtyard-rooms on the garden-loggia-garden this time does not end on the river but on the route of the former Oppidane walls, now the ring road. […]

The builder of the building was probably Bernardo Damiani, who lived in the first half of the eighteenth century, who figures among the founders of the Academy and of the Teatro della Rosa and major sponsor of the construction and decoration of the Oratory of Our Lady. […] The palace is immense, with its 36 meters in length; the faà§ade occupies almost all of what is now via Pietro Cocchi, the result of the unification of three terraced courtyards, and the building reaches a depth of about thirty meters up to the (then) “oppidian walls”. The two courtyards around which it is organised, are very different from each other: the large representative courtyard, which is accessed from the main portal, has four orders of superimposed arches on the side that opens up the staircase, and three, partly blind, on the remaining sides, while the lower courtyard can be associated with a sort of Renaissance courtyard with an open staircase and light arches, of which the central one is wider, supported by small columns and much smaller than the previous one. There is also a third internal courtyard, not with a portico, of very small dimensions and, on only two levels, near the thicker walls.

The main staircase develops in two flights around a pillar that supports two arches; the marble balustrade has balustrades arranged in vanishing positions and completely similar to those of the second courtyard of Palazzo Petrucci. […]

The last interventions consist of the cycle of frescoes by Nicolò Contestabili, occupying four rooms facing the street on the main floor, which can be accessed from both courtyards, which constitute the masterpiece of this artist, son of Antonio and nephew of Giovanni Battista and Francesco Natali . […] The frescoes are dated 1795, as appears from two writings by the artist above the access doors to the Niobe room; they may have been executed on the occasion of the wedding of Bernardo Damiani with the Marquise Maria Barbara Spinola of Genoa, belonging to the family that owned the grandiose Genoese palace.

The frescoes of Palazzo Damiani constitute the swan song of the phenomenon of squaring in Pontremoli between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which saw the undisputed protagonists of the Natali-Contestabili family, from the progenitor Francesco to the last exponent Nicolò. In these rooms there is no sign of perspective construction: only in the room of the two muses, in which two figures dominate a ceiling decorated only with clouds and cupids, the space of the walls is framed by a series of columns supporting a balustrade, residual trace of quadrature, but inside no trompe l’oeil or perspective construction, only a soft and somewhat exotic marine landscape. In the main hall, known as the Niobe room because it illustrates the killing of their offspring, exterminated by Apollo and Diana, according to the mythological story, there is no longer any link with the painted architecture. […]

Just as the frescoes conclude the parable of the Pontremoli phenomenon in painting, so the architecture of Palazzo Damiani seems to us to conclude the phenomenon of building renovation.

(taken from “Dwellings of Pontremoli” by Isa Trivelloni Manganelli, 2001)