The villa was commissioned by Genesio Sanguineti, a Genoese patrician, in the same years in which he was funding the Capuchin convent of Spotorno (1613-1623), and the design is attributed to Bartolomeo Bianco (1590-1657), the architect from Coldrerio who in Genoa signed the university palace. Sanguineti bought a spring uphill and had a conduit brought down that served first the convent and then his own house, set just below it: that water caused disputes between the friars and the Serra marquises, who took over the property around the middle of the seventeenth century, but it also made possible the terraced gardens and the kitchen gardens known from the eighteenth century for their rare and exotic plants.
What to see
The building has a rectangular plan, with the main front parallel to the sea and four corner offsets rising from the ground to the roof. On the eastern side a semicircular hanging turret projects, with a hemispherical roof of slate tiles. The alignment along the east-west axis and the internal symmetry place the house within the Ligurian type of the fortified villa, which began in the sixteenth century.
At the end of the nineteenth century the palace grew: three new volumes on the piano nobile, resting on a brick barrel vault, were attached to the hanging garden, where an eighteenth-century fountain and sundial remain. Those were the years of the Pescetto family, who bought the house in 1900 and renamed it Villa Luisa: among their regular guests was the explorer Paolo Mantegazza, who brought back tree species from his travels, later planted in the garden by Giulio Pescetto, a lawyer and botanist by passion. In the upper garden stood an anthropomorphic mascaron, part of a marble fountain set into an exedra in the boundary wall: it was stolen by persons unknown in 1996.
Visiting
Villa Canesi is a private house, lived in by the descendants of the family that restored it after the bombings of 1944, when part of the attic, the furnishings and the garden were destroyed: you cannot go in and there are no opening hours. Since 1994 it has been protected by the Soprintendenza and listed in the Catalogo Generale dei Beni Culturali. What you can do is walk around it: it stands on via Berninzoni, at the far eastern end of the old seaside village, in the Laiolo district, and it reads well from the road and from the salita ai Frati. The old stables, on via Mazzini, still exist and now house a restaurant.
Our editors' tip
Our advice is to read the context, not just the building. Around 1870 a strip of the gardens in front of the villa was expropriated for the Savona-Nice railway, and the house lost its direct relationship with the beach; in place of the Torrione di Levante, the late sixteenth-century bastion that defended the shore, the Hotel Palace went up from 1909, finished in 1913. Walking between the two, you understand how the seafront of Spotorno changed in half a century. And if you are looking for the reason behind the tie rods and chains in the walls, it is the Diano Marina earthquake of 1887.