Villa Nobel

On Sanremo’s seafront boulevard, the Moorish-style villa where Alfred Nobel spent the last years of his life preserves his study, library and material connected with his laboratory. The museum traces his work from dynamite to the testament that established the Nobel Prizes, first awarded in 1901.

Why it matters

Villa Nobel is the house where Alfred Nobel, the Swedish chemist and industrialist who invented dynamite, spent his final working years. He bought the property in 1891, moved his books, instruments and laboratory staff out of Paris, and worked here through 1896, filing patents and running experiments on new materials from a private laboratory beside the villa. During his Sanremo years, Nobel drafted his testament, which he signed in Paris in 1895. It endowed five prizes, first awarded in 1901. Nobel died in the villa on 10 December 1896. The Nobel Foundation records Sanremo’s tradition of sending flowers for the Stockholm award ceremony.

What to notice

The villa is a compact, three-storey Moorish-revival building with an exuberant profile of arcades and turrets, and the museum presents the history of its best-known resident. The basement holds the reconstructed laboratory, where photographs and instruments explain his experiments; the ground floor pairs a conference hall frescoed in Pompeian style with the scientist's study and library; the upper floor preserves the bedroom furnished with authentic 19th-century pieces. In the study the museum displays a copy of the testament. The exhibition Scopri l’Ottocento sets dynamite among other nineteenth-century innovations. The Galleria dei Premi Nobel profiles Italian laureates and includes a philatelic collection honouring figures such as Rita Levi-Montalcini and Emilio Segrè. Outside, the six-thousand-square-metre park keeps its towering Cupressus macrocarpa and an 1883 Bofors cannon Nobel used in ballistics tests.

Context and history

The pharmacist Pietro Vacchieri commissioned the seaside residence from architect Filippo Grossi in the late nineteenth century; sources differ on its precise date, giving 1873 or the end of the 1870s. A later owner, the Polish writer Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, gave the place the name Mio Nido, "My Nest". Nobel arrived in 1891, driven from France by a hostile press campaign after he sold ballistite, his smokeless propellant, to the Italian government. He renamed the villa after himself and had the architect Pio Soli direct renovation work, including a raised top floor, while keeping the original exterior lines. In the garden stood a long, single-storey laboratory, described in the memoirs of his assistant Ragnar Sohlman, where a chemist and a mechanic supported research on rubber and leather substitutes, varnishes and a patented nozzle for spinning artificial-silk fibres. Nobel also test-fired weapons from a jetty built into the sea, to the alarm of his neighbours. He wrote as well: the satire The Patent Bacillus and the tragedy Nemesis, printed weeks after his death. Sold under the terms of his will to Adolphe Philipp and then to Giobatta Parodi, the villa was bought by Sanremo's tourism board in 1969, passed to the Province of Imperia in 1973, and reopened as a museum on 20 July 2002 after nine years of restoration.