The construction of the Governor’s Palace began in 1892 at the time of the Governor Lajos Batthyány and based on the design of one of the leading Hungarian architects of the time, Alajos Hauszmann, who had already proved himself on the project of the King’s Palace and the Parliament building in Budapest. On a surface area of 12,000 m², the simple and monumental corpus of the detached neo-Renaissance palace was built based on models of the famous Palladi’s works, a French park with two fountains and balustrades made of wrought iron and a two-leaf door with sentry boxes.
Today it houses the Maritime and Historical Museum of the Croatian Littoral founded in 1961, which contains a maritime, cultural and historical, ethnographic and archaeological department. Some of the original pieces from the Governor’s palace have been preserved and presented in the salons, including furniture and art objects belonging to the periods from Renaissance to Historicism, as well as a collection of portraits of the most prominent citizens of Rijeka.
