When Clarence Bicknell died in 1918 he left the town of Bordighera the museum and library he had founded in 1888 on via Romana, and the council promptly began looking for another use for it. Margaret and Edward Elhanan Berry, of his own family, fought for five years to keep the collections together; in 1924 they secured the museum's status as an independent body. From that nucleus, inside a nineteenth-century building that had once housed the Hotel Scandinavia, the International Institute of Ligurian Studies grew.
What to see
In 1932 the Società Storico-Archeologica Ingauna e Intemelia was founded in Albenga, its name taken from the Ingauni and the Intemelii, the ancient Ligurian peoples of Albenga and Ventimiglia. Margaret Berry was among its first members and, in agreement with Nino Lamboglia, moved its headquarters into the Bicknell museum; soon afterwards she had to leave Italy, since the Fascist regime treated the English as unwelcome. The society merged into the Institute of Ligurian Studies around 1937 with Lamboglia at its head, and in 1947 the word “international” was added, to bind together scholars on both sides of the Italian-French border.
The collections, at first mainly botanical and prehistoric, were widened to local art, history and traditions. The institute keeps paintings by Pompeo Mariani, Hermann Nestel and Friederich von Kleudgen, along with furniture from villa Hanbury. It publishes the Rivista di studi liguri and, since 2003, the yearbook Ligures, which replaced the bulletins of the individual sections: there are twenty-one sections today, sixteen in Italy, three in France and two in Spain, spread roughly over the lands the ancient Ligurians actually inhabited.
Visiting
The address is via Romana 39, the upper road of English Bordighera, above the seafront. This is not a museum with continuous opening hours: it is a research body with a library and an archive, and access to the rooms and the holdings has to be arranged in advance. Write or telephone first, above all if you want to consult the publications or the run of journals.
Our editors' tip
We walk down from upper Bordighera along via Romana, between villas and gardens of the late nineteenth century: that stretch explains better than any label why an English colony put a museum here and then defended it for five years. Ask about the Rivista di studi liguri, the institute's identity card.