The Sistine Chapel, was commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV, the same pope who commissioned the Sistine Chapel in Rome. It was the funerary chapel dedicated to house the mausoleum of Sixtus IV’s parents and was completely renovated in the Roccoco style.

The Sistine Chapel is one of the most prestigious monuments in the city of Savona. Like the one in Rome, it was commissioned by the Savona pontiff Sixtus IV, who at the end of his papacy had the pre-existing capitular hall of the Franciscan convent transformed into a funerary chapel for his parents Leonardo Della Rovere and Luchina Monteleone.

The Alexandrian painter Giovanni Mazone painted the apsidal pictorial cycle and the altar polyptych-now preserved at the Petit Palais d’Avignon-and replaced in the early 19th century by the triptych by Santino Tagliafichi. The 15th-century chapel appeared as an austere rectangular hall with a square-based apse surmounted by a painted dome with a starry background.

The marble mausoleum was placed anciently on the left side of the apse. Sculptors Giovanni and Michele d’Aria were called from northern Italy for the large tripartite composition: two pilasters support a tympanum sealed at the apex by the papal coat of arms, and in the center theelegant sarcophagus surmounted by bas-reliefs presents celebratory figures of Saints Francis and Anthony accompanying their parents in the presence of the Child on the Virgin’s lap.

Sixtus IV’s nephew, Giuliano della Rovere future Pope Julius II, commissioned Mazone to decorate the 15th-century walls with frescoes of the Annunciation, the Nativity and the cycle of the Three Kings, which were saved and moved to another room during restoration in the last decades of the last century.
In the 1860s Francesco Maria, the last descendant of the Della Rovere family provided for a restoration of the building in accordance with the taste of the time, transforming it into a “modern aristocratic chapel” with an elliptical plan and bright large windows and moving the memorial to the left wall of the nave.
Lombard master craftsmen were called in to decorate the walls and cover them with floral stucco in the Rococo style.

The pseudo-elliptical vault was added to the ceiling and frescoed in the center with “The Mystery of Redemption” by Paolo Gerolamo Brusco.. The oak floor plan emphasizes the celebration of family and echoes the theme of the papal coat of arms present on the four sides of the vault.

In the counterfacade was inserted an organ tribune with a new instrument commissioned in 1764 from Filippo and Felice Piccaluga and recently restored.

The sinuously textured case enhances the scenic magnificence of the wall especially when the doors are wide open with the facade reeds in evidence. The role of music is also projected forward through the parapet rich in polychrome stucco on which vivid reproductions of musical instruments are highlighted.