Villa Durazzo e Parco

Villa Durazzo is a seventeenth-century patrician residence with a three-hectare park on the hill above Santa Margherita Ligure. The municipality bought the estate in 1973.

Why it matters

Genoa's merchant aristocracy built villas all along the Riviera, and Villa Durazzo is the Tigullio's most complete survivor of that world. The estate began as a house with a tower recorded on the site by 1609; in January 1678 Giovanni Luca Durazzo, of one of Genoa's great noble houses, launched the radical rebuilding that produced the present palace, and the works ran on beyond 1707. Later owners — the princes Centurione, then the Chierichetti family — kept enriching it, and for two decades around 1890 the villa even ran as the Grand Hotel, hosting Queen Margherita in 1904. Since 1973 it has belonged to the Comune of Santa Margherita Ligure, which preserves the estate as a public cultural asset.

What to notice

The piano nobile contains Genoese paintings from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, including canvases and fresco fragments attributed to Domenico Piola, Giovanni Battista Paggi, Giovanni Andrea De Ferrari, Luciano Borzone and Gio Enrico Vaymer. Family portraits fill the Sala Vaymer. The Salotto Vietri is named for its late-seventeenth-century majolica floor; the Salotto delle Grottesche has a grotesque-painted ceiling and polychrome Murano chandelier. A sea-facing loggia carries a trompe-l'oeil allegory of the four seasons beside a family chapel. The Salone degli Stucchi has a vaulted ceiling nine metres high above a marble-mosaic floor. The Camera della Regina Margherita commemorates the queen's 1904 stay. Another room reconstructs the study of writer Vittorio G. Rossi, born in the town in 1898. The three-hectare park includes an agrumeto on the seaward terraces, whose orange, lemon and grapefruit plantings descend from the Durazzo period, and a formal Italian garden shaped in the nineteenth century.

Context and history

The villa's builders belonged to the Durazzo, a family of Albanian-origin merchants who reached Genoa in the late fourteenth century and eventually gave the Republic nine doges. Giovanni Luca Durazzo — diplomat, heir of the 1664 paternal bequest, and brother of Eugenio, who bought the palace now known as Palazzo Reale — conceived the Santa Margherita residence as a seat of representation, and the choice paid off: in 1708 the Senate decreed that the trade fairs of Sestri Levante transfer to Santa Margherita, turning the villa into a stage for the coast's commercial elite. Tradition long credited the design to Galeazzo Alessi, though the documented presence on site is the sculptor Giovanni Pietro Orsolino, whose marble balustrade is read as a signature; the true authorship remains uncertain and is best treated as such. The Durazzo left in the late eighteenth century, and in 1821 Marchese Marcello Durazzo sold the property to Giovanni Battista Centurione Scotto, whose family held it until 1919, with the Maragliano-managed Grand Hotel interlude from 1890 to 1910. The industrialist Alfredo Chierichetti then acquired it and commissioned the painter Giovanni Fraschetti to restore the interiors. The Comune's purchase in 1973 — a visit by Karol Wojtyła, the future John Paul II, followed in 1976 — turned a private summer residence into the town's public monument.