Built around the middle of the 19th century, Palazzo del Parco changed jobs several times before settling into its present one. The turning point came in March 1965, when the municipality of Diano Marina bought the building: the civic library moved onto the first floor, opened to the public on 17 October 1972 and named the year before after the local poet Angiolo Silvio Novaro. The library itself had been established by a council resolution of 26 April 1957, although the same proposal had been circulating since December 1926: some thirty years of waiting, then fifteen more before the doors opened.
What to see
The rooms of the palazzo hold the civic museum, split into three sections. The archaeological one is the largest: rearranged in 2004 by the International Institute of Ligurian Studies, together with the municipality and the Superintendency for the archaeological heritage of Liguria, it fills nine exhibition rooms plus a multimedia room. All the finds come from the stretch of land between Capo Berta and Capo Cervo, the two headlands that close the gulf: the same coast settled by the Ingauni Ligurians and later taken over by the Romans, who placed the way station of Lucus Bormani here.
The Risorgimento section opened to the public in 2007 and was rearranged in 2011 for the 150 years of Italian unity; it carries the name of Andrea Rossi, born in Diano, the pilot of Garibaldi's Thousand. The third section is mineralogical and began as a private collection: about 250 pieces, most of them from the De Cavero family, bought by the municipality in the 1960s. They took a long detour before arriving here: parked in the display cases of the local middle school in 1971, they only entered Palazzo del Parco in 2005.
Visiting
The building stands in the town centre, and Diano Marina has its own station on the Genoa-Ventimiglia line, in service since 25 January 1872. Two institutions live under one roof with separate lives, the library on the first floor and the museum in the halls, so their opening times do not necessarily match: check them before turning up. Allow a good hour for the museum trail, because the nine archaeological rooms are densely packed and the multimedia room is there to put back in order what you have just seen.
Our editors' tip
We start with the De Cavero minerals, the least predictable of the three sections, and finish on the first floor, asking the library for something by Angiolo Silvio Novaro: it is the quickest way to understand why a nineteenth-century building carries a poet's name. Then, without leaving town, it is worth walking to the archaeological area of Prato Fiorito, where the deconsecrated church of Saints Nazarius and Celsus stands and where the same International Institute of Ligurian Studies has run excavation campaigns since 2005: the objects seen in the cases go back to the ground they came out of.