In 1914 Queen Margherita of Savoy bought an entire villa because she wanted the garden. The house — the old Villa Bischoffsheim, by then Villa Etelinda — belonged to Lord Claude Bowes-Lyon, XIV Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne; in its park, on 30 March 1914, work began on her new royal residence under the Milanese architect Luigi Broggi. The building was finished at the end of October 1915 and inaugurated on 25 February 1916: from then on the queen spent several months a year in Bordighera, usually from May to December, and she died here on 4 January 1926, aged 74.
What to see
Broggi built it in the baroque manner of the eighteenth century: a basement for the household staff, with ironing room, laundry, boiler and the motor of the lift; a ground floor with entrance hall, audience room, library, reception room and dining room. A small door off the hall leads into the queen's private chapel. The staircase to the upper floors is lit by three tall stained-glass windows, still the original ones, carrying the double Savoy arms of Margherita and Umberto I. At the top the last floor opens into a panoramic terrace, and from it a walkway crosses the slope into the upper garden.
The queen's apartment was on the first floor — vestibule, office, bedroom, bathroom — beside three smaller apartments for her lady-in-waiting and for the royal family; the second floor housed the lady of the palace, Countess Maria Cristina Pes, and the first gentleman, Prince Emilio Barbiano di Belgiojoso-Este. Almost nothing survives of the original furniture, but the overdoors remain, painted with the Savoy residences Margherita loved best: Palazzo Margherita, the castle at Gressoney-Saint-Jean, the hunting lodge of Stupinigi. Broggi had given every bedroom its own bathroom and the house a lift: of the first only the queen's survives, of the second the original cabin, restored and set beside the dining room.
Visiting
Let us be plain: the villa is shut. The town of Bordighera and the province of Imperia bought it on 16 September 2008; from June 2011, for roughly two years, the Terruzzi Foundation restored it and ran it as an exhibition venue for the collection of Guido Angelo Terruzzi, then left the building in June 2015 and handed it back to its public owners. The doors have not opened to visitors since. What is left is the climb of via Romana, the street of the great winter villas above the centre, with a view of the front of the house and the palms of the park; before travelling, ask the town hall whether anything has changed.
Our editors' tip
We go anyway, and then carry on down to the sea: at the foot of the pine wood on the headland, a few steps from the church of Sant'Ampelio, stands the white marble statue that Bordighera dedicated to the queen on 4 April 1940, the work of Italo Griselli. It is the quickest way to grasp how far Margherita belongs to this town: she invited Carducci, Fogazzaro and the painter Pompeo Mariani here, and Mariani's own house, a little further up the hill, can still be seen.