The park of Villa Durazzo Pallavicini in Pegli was proclaimed “Italy’s Most Beautiful Park 2017” in the public parks category. Eight hectares on a seaside slope, designed between 1837 and 1846 by the Teatro Carlo Felice set designer Michele Canzio for the Marquis Ignazio Alessandro Pallavicini: not a garden but a walk-through theatrical performance with prologue, three acts of four scenes each and epilogue, featuring a Temple of Diana, a Roman Bridge, a Turkish Pavilion, a Chinese Pagoda, an Egyptian Obelisk, the Grottoes of the Underworld and lakes. It includes the Clelia Durazzo Botanical Garden founded in 1794 — one of the oldest in Italy — and the Museum of Ligurian Archaeology with the “Prince of Arene Candide” from about 24,000 years ago. Google rating 4.6 over more than 3,100 reviews.
Where it is
Villa Durazzo Pallavicini lies in Via Ignazio Pallavicini 13, 16155 Genoa Pegli, in the far western Ponente of the city. The park occupies the hill immediately above the Pegli seafront, a district that until the nineteenth century was a seaside resort of the Genoese aristocracy and that today preserves an elegant residential character. From Genoa Pegli station, on the Genoa-Ventimiglia line, the park entrance is five minutes on foot: you exit on the mountain side, cross the square and climb Via Pallavicini. The train is the recommended way, also because it avoids the parking problem in the centre of Pegli. By car: A10 motorway exit Genova Pegli, paid parking in the side streets. By bus, AMT line 1 connects Voltri to Caricamento via Pegli.
A park as a theatrical performance
Michele Canzio was not a landscape architect: he was the set designer of the Teatro Carlo Felice of Genoa, the city’s main opera house. When the Marquis Ignazio Alessandro Pallavicini (1800-1871) commissioned him in 1837 to redesign the family park, Canzio brought the grammar of nineteenth-century theatre into the landscape. The result, inaugurated on 23 September 1846, is a narrative itinerary of about two hours, walked in a precise order, with stations conceived as dramatic scenes complete with entrances, exits, twists and revelations.
The park is articulated in three acts, preceded by a prologue and closed by an epilogue. Each act contains four scenes. The script is not arbitrary: it follows a classical dramaturgy with crescendo and catharsis.
Prologue — The backstory: the visitor climbs from the twin entrances, the Gothic Avenue and the Classical Avenue, which stand for the choice between romantic and classicist culture. It is the presentation of the themes, in which the spectator chooses (or does not) the starting point.
Act I — The return to nature: four scenes evoking the Golden Age and the flight from corrupt civilisation. The visitor passes the Hermitage, the Place of Delights, the Old Lake with water lilies and the Spring — this last completed by the reconstruction of the Spring Hut.
Act II — The retrieval of history: four scenes in which traces of civilisation emerge scattered through the park. The Chapel of the Madonna, the Swiss Chalet, the Captain’s Castle (a purpose-built neo-medieval folly) and the Captain’s Mausoleum.
Act III — The catharsis: the most spectacular section. The visitor enters the Grottoes of the Underworld, an underground labyrinth that Canzio conceived as an explicit quotation of Dante’s Inferno; one emerges onto the Great Lake, the coup de théâtre of the park: at the centre of the waters rises the Temple of Diana, a small circular monopteros with Ionic columns of white marble, sheltering the goddess of nature accompanied by her dog — a symbol of faithfulness and perseverance in the pursuit of knowledge. Around the lake stand architectures from various continents: the Roman Bridge, the Temple of Flora, the Chinese Pagoda, the Chinese Bridge, the Turkish Pavilion, the Egyptian Obelisk. The monuments represent the civilisations of the world — West, Middle East, East, Africa — gathered around the central temple of Diana as the unifying deity.
Epilogue — The water tricks: jets, small cascades, a panoramic closing with a view of the sea at Pegli. The spectator leaves the theatre and returns to reality.
The esoteric-masonic symbolism
Beneath the scenographic surface, the park conceals an esoteric-masonic programme declared by the client himself, initiated into Scottish Rite Freemasonry. The itinerary in three acts follows the initiatory path of the masonic degrees: the apprentice who withdraws from corrupt civilisation (Act I), the fellow who rediscovers tradition (Act II), the master who faces the trial of catharsis through the grottoes — the equivalent of the “chamber of reflection” of masonic rites (Act III). The symbols scattered through the park — broken columns, obelisks, pyramids, hourglasses, skulls — are all signs of nineteenth-century masonic symbology. The Temple of Diana at the centre of the lake, a circular architecture open to the four cardinal points, is a clear reference to the universality of initiatory knowledge. Canzio and Pallavicini never concealed this matrix, which was in fact considered proof of the cultural refinement of the Genoese elite of the nineteenth century, when Freemasonry was a decisive political force in the Ligurian Risorgimento.
The Clelia Durazzo Botanical Garden (1794)
Within the park, above the Great Lake, lies the Clelia Durazzo Pallavicini Botanical Garden, one of the oldest in Italy. It was founded in 1794 by the Marchioness Clelia Durazzo (1760-1837), wife of Giuseppe Maria Durazzo and aunt of Ignazio Pallavicini. Clelia was one of the few aristocratic women scientists of late eighteenth-century Liguria: she collaborated with Domenico Viviani (future founder of the Botanical Garden of the University of Genoa, 1803) and with other botanists of the time. The garden today keeps tree specimens more than two centuries old, glasshouses dedicated to specific plant groups (succulents, carnivorous plants, ferns) and outdoor collections of rare species. Among the monumental trees: ginkgo biloba, sequoia, nineteenth-century magnolias, Japanese camellias more than 150 years old. The park of Villa Durazzo Pallavicini hosts in fact the largest and oldest historic camellia collection in Italy: about 260 varieties, many of which were imported directly from Japan and China in the nineteenth century, when the camellia was a fashionable flower in the aristocratic European residences.
The Museum of Ligurian Archaeology
The main villa, at the foot of the park, has housed since 1936 the Museum of Ligurian Archaeology — one of the civic museums of Genoa. Thirteen exhibition rooms tell 100,000 years of human history in Liguria, from the Lower Palaeolithic to the Roman age.
The star of the collection is the “Prince of Arene Candide”, the burial of a young Palaeolithic hunter of about 24,000 years ago discovered in the Arene Candide Cave at Finale Ligure. The grave goods are exceptional: the deceased lay on a bed of red ochre, with a headdress of pierced shells (Cyclope neritea), necklaces of deer teeth, flint blades and a large ornament of mammoth ivory. The reconstruction of the burial, set up in a dedicated room, is considered one of the most moving displays of European prehistoric heritage.
The museum also preserves: objects of the Bronze Age (the Zignago statue-stele), warrior burials of the Iron Age, finds from the first Roman Genoa with Greek red-figure and Etruscan ceramics, and a noteworthy Egyptian section with the mummy of the priest Pasherienaset of the 7th century BC. The Egyptian collection arrived through the bequest of Prince Oddone of Savoy, which also included Greek vases, Roman gems and objects from Magna Graecia. The museum underwent a significant expansion and reorganisation in the 2000s. Opening hours independent of the park.
History of the villa and the Pallavicini
The villa stands on a seventeenth-eighteenth century core. In the late eighteenth century the Durazzo family created the botanical garden of Clelia here. The phase of greatest splendour coincides with the commission of the Marquis Ignazio Alessandro Pallavicini, Genoese politician and businessman, who inherited the property from the Durazzo and in 1837 began the great project to reshape it as a park-theatre. The inauguration of 23 September 1846 was a public festival that remained in the city’s memory: the visitors were taken through the scenes in a prearranged script, with water tricks, live music, statues brought to life by costumed extras.
After the marquis’s death in 1871, the property passed from generation to generation. During the twentieth century there were alternating phases: neglect between the two wars, damage during the Second World War, slow post-war restoration. In 1992 the villa and park were acquired by the City of Genoa through a dedicated private foundation. Since 2016 management has been entrusted to a public-private company that has carried out an ambitious restoration plan. The “Italy’s Most Beautiful Park” recognition came in 2017, awarded by the Scientific Committee of the prize in the public parks category, together with Villa La Foce in the Val d’Orcia.
The restoration of the Grottoes of the Underworld (2021)
The Grottoes of the Underworld, the climax of Act III, had remained closed to the public for about 25 years after a brief restoration in 1992. Definitive reopening took place on Saturday 6 March 2021, at the end of a structural consolidation financed by the City of Genoa through the “Patto per Genova” programme. The same works allowed the restoration of the Spring and the reconstruction of the Spring Hut of Act I, missing from the park for more than eighty years. In her official statements, the director Silvana Ghigino spoke of the park’s “rhythm of rebirth” — a process that continues with progressive restoration of other scenes.
When to go
The park is open from 1 March to 1 November, every day except Mondays. Current hours: Tuesday-Friday 9:30-19:00, Saturday, Sunday and holidays 10:00-19:30, with last admission two hours before closing to allow a complete visit of the three acts.
Spring (March-May) is the most magical moment: the old camellias flower between February and April, followed by magnolias, wisterias, azaleas, water lilies. Summer is less advisable for the intense heat on the climbing paths — but the grottoes provide cool shelter and the mature canopy offers dense shade. Autumn offers extraordinary colours, with foliage turning to yellow and copper; the water lilies are still in bloom in October.
Recommended visit length: two hours for the park, an extra hour if you visit the Museum of Ligurian Archaeology. The official map, distributed at the entrance, is essential to follow the itinerary in the correct theatrical order. Those wishing to go deeper can book thematic guided tours on the esoteric symbols or on the botany.
What’s around
Pegli is a district with a historic and seaside vocation, midway between the port and the industrial Ponente. A day at Villa Pallavicini can easily be extended with:
- Eight hundred metres along the coast is Villa Doria Centurione, sixteenth-century residence of Adamo Centurione, today home of the Naval Museum, with a 115,000 m² park designed by Galeazzo Alessi.
- On the Pegli seafront, the free beach of Pegli is one of the largest sandy beaches in the City of Genoa.
- Four km westwards, Villa Duchessa di Galliera in Voltri extends the experience with another 32 hectares of historic park, neo-Romanesque castle and 1786 theatre.
- Pegli station is served by trains every 15-30 minutes, making it easy to combine a morning visit to Pallavicini with lunch in Pegli’s old borough and an afternoon in Voltri.
Practical info
- Address: Via Ignazio Pallavicini 13, 16155 Genoa Pegli
- Phone: +39 010 8531544 · +39 393 8830842
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: villadurazzopallavicini.it
- Size: 8 hectares, seaside slope
- Design: Michele Canzio, set designer of the Teatro Carlo Felice
- Patron: Marquis Ignazio Alessandro Pallavicini
- Build dates: 1837-1846 (inaugurated 23 September 1846)
- Admission: paid (full ticket, reduced for children/students/seniors)
- Hours: 1 March – 1 November, closed Mondays. Tue-Fri 9:30-19:00; Sat-Sun-holidays 10:00-19:30. Last admission 2h before closing
- Getting there: train to Genoa Pegli station (5 min walk); AMT 1; by car A10 exit Genoa Pegli
- Visit duration: about 2 hours (park) + 1 hour Museum of Archaeology
- Features: Clelia Durazzo Botanical Garden (1794), Grottoes of the Underworld (reopened 6 March 2021), oldest historic camellia collection in Italy
- Museum of Ligurian Archaeology: founded 1936, 13 rooms, separate admission
- Recognition: Italy’s Most Beautiful Park 2017 (public parks)
- Google rating: 4.6 ★ over 3,163 reviews
