Villa Durazzo-Pallavicini

Michele Canzio, a theatre designer, created the garden at Pegli as a sequence of acts and scenes across a hillside of grottoes, lakes and temples, with historic camellias and a belvedere above the coast.

Why it matters

Villa Durazzo-Pallavicini is the argument that a garden can tell a story. Between 1840 and 1846 the scenographer of Genoa's Teatro Carlo Felice, Michele Canzio, laid out the hillside at Pegli for the marchese Ignazio Pallavicini, staging the ground like a dramatic script rather than a parterre. The Ministry of Culture registers the park as a garden of historic and artistic interest and calls it one of the most original romantic parks anywhere; in 2017 the network competition "Il Parco più bello d'Italia" named it the country's best public park, and the city of Genoa's own record of the prize describes it as one of the highest expressions of the nineteenth-century romantic garden. A restoration campaign culminated in its September 2016 reopening, 170 years after its 1846 inauguration.

What to notice

The garden's three acts and four scenes each combine architectural and landscape features, including the Viale Classico, Coffee House, Hermit's House, Roman bridge, Gardens of Flora and Temple of Diana above the Great Lake and Chinese pagoda. Two lakes feed cascades, streams and fountains. The Grotte degli Inferi contain stalactite vaults and an underground lake. A camellia walk planted from 1856 includes numerous species, alongside a monumental camphor tree and a cedar of Lebanon.

Context and history

Canzio approached the hill as a stage designer would, and the 2017 jury read the result exactly so: a romantic garden conceived as a theatrical work, divided into acts with a prologue and an epilogue. Contemporary accounts and the award citation agree that the marchese intended a philosophical, even esoteric itinerary — darkness in the grottoes, contemplation at the hermitage, triumph at the summit arch — so the walk becomes an argument about nature, reason and the sublime in the manner of its age. Works took six years from the 1840 start, and the park was inaugurated on 23 September 1846 to coincide with the Congress of Italian Scientists, showing the garden to the scientific world of the day. Twentieth-century decline and storm damage eventually led to a modern restoration cycle: the grottoes were restored in 1992, followed by the wider restoration that culminated in 2016.