Villa Durazzo-Pallavicini

Villa Durazzo-Pallavicini is a historic villa with a nineteenth century English style romantic park and small botanical garden in Pegli, a suburb of Genoa, Italy, next to the town's railway station; the villa now houses the Museo di Archeologia Ligure. Clelia Durazzo Grimaldi founded the botanical garden on the site in the late seventeenth century, and her nephew Ignazio Alessandro Pallavicini laid out the present park between 1840 and 1846, arranging it as a sequence of scenes likened to a play in three acts titled Return to Nature, Memory, and Purification. The park opened in September 1846 during a scientific congress and quickly became nationally famous; the family gave it to the city of Genoa in 1928, it was restored beginning in 1991, and in 2017 it was named the most beautiful garden in Italy.