Under the Ghibelline battlements runs a band of small arches carrying 144 painted coats of arms: the Genoese families tied to the Pallavicino, from the Fieschi to the Spinola, the Grimaldi to the Grillo, the Durazzo to the Sauli. Nineteen more, in the lunettes of the first-floor windows, recall the places of their exploits, from Jerusalem to Cyprus, Sardinia to Corsica. The turreted castle, though, is a late disguise: beneath it is the villa Tobia Pallavicino had built in 1558 beside a medieval tower, and which in 1880 Luisa Sauli Pallavicino handed to the architect Luigi Rovelli to bring into the taste of the day.
What to see
Rovelli raised the tower by twenty-six metres and crowned both house and tower with merlons, turning a sixteenth-century summer residence into a castle. Around it, in place of the fields that had fed the estate for three centuries, he laid out the park: artificial basins linked by streams, a waterfall and a small lake in the low ground to the south-east, where a Swiss chalet also stood, now gone.
To the west, behind the villa, is the medieval village: existing buildings dressed in the late nineteenth century with merlons and turrets, joined to the villa by a path that imitates a wall-walk with sentry boxes. The glasshouse came in 1931, when the marchioness Matilda Negrotto Cambiaso, who gave the estate its name, commissioned Lamberto Cusani to build it north of the house: iron and glass on French and English models of the previous century, a taller central pavilion between two symmetrical wings, geometric decoration, vine scrolls and cornucopias.
Visiting
The park belongs to the town and has three ways in. The west entrance, from piazza Rodocanachi, is the best: it goes through the village and up onto the wall-walk, which looks down over the whole southern side. The other two, from piazza Allende to the east and via Sauli Pallavicino to the north, start straight avenues that lead to the villa. The building houses the town hall of Arenzano, which is why you nearly always look at it from outside; the coats of arms, restored by the architect Arcangelo Mazzella, read perfectly well from the lawn.
Our editors' tip
Head straight for the cedar of Lebanon near the circular basin in the southern part: it is listed among the monumental trees of Liguria and is worth the walk on its own. Then give a few minutes to the peacocks that live west of the house and to the turtles in the tanks by the entrance; mallards and other ducks settle on the water, because Arenzano lies inside the Beigua regional nature park. With children, the playground is on the flat ground to the south-east.