Pegli is one of the most beautiful places in the west area of Genoa (check out the route from Porto Antico with the “Navebus”). Villa Durazzo Pallavicini, sited in the hearts of Pegli, is a nineteenth-century park, a beautiful example of Italian romantic garden, it spread over a 2.5 km route that crosses almost 9 hectares of land between art, nature and spirituality, with lakes, caves, esoteric symbology, suggestive architecture and preciousness botanicals, such as the largest and oldest historical camellia in Italy.
The inspiration of this joy was Clelia Durazzo, wife of Giuseppe Grimaldi, an expert botanist who made the garden a collection of rare and exotic plants. Between 1836 and 1846, his nephew, Ignazio Alessandro Pallavicini, entrusted the restoration of the building and its naturalistic appurtenances to Michele Canzio, Carlo Felice’s set designer.
The park, with its spectacular paths up to the charming lake at the centre of which lie Diana’s temple, was transformed into a large open-air show, on the model of the redundant opera performances of the 19th century.
A shady avenue of holm oaks leads to the imposing noble palace of Villa Durazzo Pallavicini, today the seat of the Civic Museum of Ligurian Archeology which houses historical artifacts covering a period from the Palaeolithic to the Late Antiquity (III-IV-V century AD). The collection saw the light of day in 1936 (it was taken to the Tiglieto Abbey for the war and reopened in 1953) and is an authentic journey through the history or rather into the proto-history of Liguria.
Via Ignazio Pallavicini 13, Genova
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