In Bordighera, Pompeo Mariani is remembered as the painter who kept the queen waiting. Margherita of Savoy turned up in via Fontana Vecchia unannounced, to compliment him on the portrait he had made of Umberto I; Mariani was in his working clothes and went up to change, and when he appeared at the door of La Specola the queen had been standing there for ten minutes. It ended well: the master of the house used the occasion to make a quick portrait of her, now kept at the International Institute of Ligurian Studies.
What to see
The house began as a cottage: in 1885 Countess Fanshawe had it built on the hill by Charles Garnier, architect of the Paris Opéra, one floor above a basement with a large window that is still there. Mariani, nephew of the painter Mosè Bianchi, bought the property in 1909 and at once called in Luigi Broggi and Angelo Savoldi to add a storey; then, in 1914, his friend Rodolfo Winter widened the north-west wing and made the terrace over the lower town, the sea and the French coast, bringing the villa to 600 m². Inside are still the original furnishings and the painter's own things: the drawing room panelled by Eugenio Quarti, the pendulum clock given by Arturo Toscanini showing a scene from Turandot, the brass display case Giovanni Lomazzi made for the Paris Universal Exposition of 1889, the bedroom left intact with his razors and talcum powder on the shelf.
In the garden stands La Specola, the studio Rodolfo Winter built in 1911: some 250 m² of glass walls and skylight, so that the light inside would match the light outside. Over the entrance is the wrought-iron canopy by Alessandro Mazzucotelli; at the corners, a pinnacle from Milan Cathedral and the bas-relief portrait of the painter's wife, Marcellina Caronni, signed by Paolo Troubetzkoy. Within, Quarti's bookcase-desk frames a window, an eighteenth-century fireplace closes the far end like an apse, and above the door survives the loft from which people watched the painter at work. Of the garden, a hectare carved out of the old Moreno gardens, what stays with you are the taggiasca olives: two of them, near La Specola, have been put by the forestry service at around 500 years old.
Visiting
Villa Mariani is a private house, not a museum with fixed opening hours: La Specola is the seat of the Fondazione Pompeo Mariani, which keeps there a permanent display of the master's paintings and of those of his uncle Mosè Bianchi, and visits are arranged in advance. Since 2008 the villa has belonged to the Italian Historic Houses association, and it is one of roughly 200 painters' studios of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries still open to visitors worldwide; the gardens are part of the Grandi Giardini Italiani. You climb up from via Fontana Vecchia, above the centre: allow a good hour for house, studio and park.
Our editors' tip
Look for Monet's olive tree. The French painter came through Bordighera in 1884 and worked in this part of the old Moreno gardens: panels in the park reproduce his canvases at the exact spot where they were painted, and the tree of the Study of Olive Trees can still be picked out. Then walk round to the south side of the villa and look up at the balcony rail of Mariani's bedroom: Mazzucotelli left his signature there in iron, “Ave Mariani pictor celeberrime el to Lisander ferreé”.