It was built between 1536 and 1544 by the Genoese banker Gerolamo Grimaldi Oliva, who had become rich in Portugal and Spain where he managed the collection of taxes in Cordoba and Granada.

The 15th-century building, with its dual character of a decentralised city palace and a suburban villa residence, holds in its extraordinary ambiguity the secret genesis of an architectural renovation that few have so far clearly denounced in its ancestry.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Evan Mackenzie, representative in Genoa of Lloyd's of London, commissioned the Florentine architect Gino Coppedè to adapt the palazzo as an office building.

[2] On this occasion, in addition to new buildings in the rear garden area, the courtyard was covered with a stained-glass skylight, at the centre of which stand the symbols of the cities of Rome, Venice and Turin, and the tempera decorations of the vaults and several rooms were made by the Apulian painter Nicola Mascialino, of Neo-Renaissance architecture, who also intervened heavily in the interior decoration of rooms where there are frescoes by Luca Cambiaso (Ulysses who thunders the Proci, Episodes from the Odyssey, Satyr mocked by Cupid) and Lazzaro Calvi (Apollo on the Chariot).

When Italy entered the war in May 1915, the Mackenzie family made some rooms in the Palazzo della Meridiana available to be converted into a hospital for Italian officers.