Giardini di Villa Ormond

The gardens of Villa Ormond transformed a Swiss entrepreneur's 1875 winter estate into one of Sanremo's notable parks: palms and monumental ficus, a Japanese garden associated with the city's friendship pact with Atami, and the fountain Pietro Agosti designed after the municipality bought the park in 1930.

Why it matters

The gardens express Sanremo's identity as the Riviera dei Fiori. The park descends from the estate that Michel Louis Ormond, a Vevey cigar manufacturer, assembled from 1875 as a winter residence for his wife, the French poet Marie Margherite Renet, and it preserves the plant collections that made the Riviera dei Fiori a scientific as well as a pleasure landscape: date palms already recorded in the Napoleonic land register, jacarandas, palms of the reclining species, cedars and monumental ficus. The estate's garden was organised in distinct planted areas. The municipality's 1930 purchase transformed a private landscape of acclimatisation into part of the city's civic heritage.

What to notice

The estate's gardens are divided by the later seaside avenue. The lower grounds include a fountain designed by podestà Pietro Agosti after the 1930 municipal purchase, flanked by statues of the Mexican poet and historian Ignacio Altamirano, who died in Sanremo, and Nicholas I of Montenegro. The upper grounds rise toward the villa through planted areas of palms, cedars and monumental ficus, with an Italianate section and a Japanese garden inspired by Zen philosophy and the city's twinning with Atami. Rebuilt after the 1887 earthquake by Swiss architect Emile Réverdin, the villa has classical features and Renaissance-style loggias; one wing houses the International Institute of Humanitarian Law.

Context and history

The story begins with the Villa Rambaldi property that Ormond bought in 1875 and lost to the violent earthquake that struck the Ligurian coast in February 1887; the replacement villa took two years of work and was completed in 1889 to Réverdin's design, set at the top of an English-style garden. Guests of the era included the Princes of Prussia, the Duke of Aosta and the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, names that place the estate at the centre of winter Sanremo. After the deaths of Michel Louis Ormond in 1901 and of his wife in 1925, the city bought the complex in 1930 for three million lire: the seaside half of the garden received Agosti's fountain and the upper slope an exhibition pavilion. The humanitarian institute arrived in the villa's wing in a later century, adding an international institutional role to a horticultural one.