The house, remembered for having been the residence of Nicodemo Trincadini, is a tower-house, now incorporated in an elegant eighteenth-century building, which presents on one side the character of the fortified tower, on the other the features attributable to the taste and art renaissance characteristics of a character with artistic sensibility and culture.

The origins of this house are not certain, nor do we have documents that tell us about its history. The terrible fire of 1495 certainly acts as a watershed in the history of Pontremoli since, if there were any documents or sources regarding the house, they were lost on that occasion. Probably the construction of a tower house was not the will of the first documented owner, Nicodemo Trincadini, who acted as a diplomat on behalf of the Sforza throughout Italy.

The undisputed fame he enjoyed among his contemporaries and his extraordinary skills in the diplomatic field earned him the title of count palatine by concession of the emperor Frederick III (1457) and of count of the Sacred Lateran Palaces by concession of Pope Pius II (1460 ). Furthermore, he was known as an illustrious man of culture and boasted a copious personal library, which was uncommon for the time, which he kept right in his home in Pontremoli.

We don’t know if Nicodemo inherited the house from his family, who already owned one in the city, or if more likely he bought it from another family, perhaps precisely to preserve his cultural heritage. A refinement of the forms is certainly clearly visible, which can be found in some clearly Renaissance elements attributable to an intervention by him on the building. Comparing the tower with a building owned by the Sforza in Pontremoli, one would think that some stylistic similarities are the result of some Milanese masters who perhaps also had a hand in the house of Nicodemus.

«The notary Ser Francesco Enreghini attests that, apart from the fortress of Piagnaro and some churches, only the house of Nicodemo Trincadini and that of Matteo della Rocca and Battista Cresci in S. Pietro survived the fire. Since there is no more news of the latter two, the house of Nicodemus can currently be considered as the oldest in Pontremoli » (B. Campi, 1701). From the terrible fire that destroyed the city in 1495, only three houses remained standing. The height of the roof was in fact too high for the Swiss to be able to set it on fire. It is also said that in that circumstance many people from Pontremoli found refuge inside the house with their possessions, keeping up with the solid walls of the tower against the soldiers of Charles VIII.

The house and its properties were then left to the children. From what we can understand from the few available documents, we know that the house bordered on the left with Mastro Gherardo dal Campo, in front with the public road, behind with the Verde river and, on the right, with the church of San Colombano.

Between the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, the ancient tower house was merged into a noble palace, later called Galli Bonaventura. Of the original structure, the internal articulation of the various floors, originally obtained by means of wooden floors (at least for the upper part), the vertical distribution inside the tower and the original openings were radically transformed. The vertical distribution was attributed to the monumental staircase, decorated with niches and statues, which was built next to the west wall of the tower, accessible from the porticoed courtyard. The use of the top part was lost and was completely excluded and used as an attic; the large stone vault was then built (perhaps those on the lower floors already belong to an earlier period) to form a large hall on the main floor. Finally, numerous fifteenth-century openings that no longer enjoyed direct sunlight due to the juxtaposition of new buildings such as the adjacent building were closed.