On 11 May 1904 Queen Margherita of Savoy stayed in this house, and the room she slept in has not been touched since: the Camera Umbertina is as it was that day. The palace stands on top of the hill that used to divide the settlement of Pescino from that of Corte, where doge Giovanni Luca Chiavari had a fortified castle raised on the ruins of a Roman building of the third century. In 1678, with the castle by then a ruin, it was pulled down and the present block was built in the manner of Galeazzo Alessi: a villa, as its owners wrote, for the “relief of body and soul”.
What to see
On the first floor the Salone degli Stucchi is lit by a large Louis XVI chandelier; a little further along the Camera Umbertina opens. In the Prince's apartments and the rooms around them hang paintings, frescoes and trompe-l'œil work of the Genoese school of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Domenico Piola, Giovanni Andrea De Ferrari, Luciano Borzone, Gio Enrico Vaymer. The complex also holds the art museum dedicated to Vittorio Giovanni Rossi, the writer and journalist born in Santa Margherita, and the Bellometti collection.
Outside, the Italian-style garden tells the changes of ownership better than the documents do. The Centurione princes, who arrived in 1821 and account for the villa's second name, enlarged the palace and brought in exotic plants and neoclassical marble statues. In 1919 Alfredo Chierichetti added palms, camellias and magnolias and laid the paths in risseu, the patterned Ligurian cobbling. In June 1998, for the number of tree species gathered here, the garden was twinned with the Hanbury botanical gardens at Ventimiglia.
Visiting
It is a few minutes uphill on foot from the centre of Santa Margherita. The site has belonged to the town council since 1973 and takes in two historic houses, the park and the museum. Next door stands the baroque parish church of San Giacomo di Corte, worth the two-minute detour. The palace is regularly used for exhibitions, conferences and cultural events, so it is worth checking beforehand which rooms are open on the day you go.
Our editors' tip
Ask about the hotel years: towards the end of the nineteenth century the villa served for a while as the Grand Hotel of Santa Margherita and put up the names then circulating on the Riviera. Once you know that, the proportions of the rooms read differently. Then go out into the park at the hour when the sun drops over the Gulf of Tigullio: from up there you take in the whole bay, and that is when the risseu underfoot shows best, black and white pebbles laid out in patterns.