The gardens of the Villa Durazzo-Pallavicini, near Genoa, Italy
VILLA DURAZZO-PALLAVICINI at Pegli near Genoa is home to one of the most extraordinary gardens in Europe—romantic, fantastic, classical, theatrical and, above all, great fun to visit. It should be on everyone’s bucket list.
The garden at Durazzo-Pallavicini is hidden behind the neo-Classical villa, perched proudly on a steep promontory above the Mediterranean. There’s quite a long climb up the cobbled drive, lined with young evergreen oaks, to get there. The villa itself is grand and massive. It used to dominate the hillside but, since the end of the Second World War, the slopes that run down to the sea have been cluttered with blocks of flats and sprawling developments that, nowadays, we realise should never have been allowed.
The villa was given its present form by Marchese Ignazio Alessandro Pallavicini (1800–71) in the 1840s, when he
