Origins The spread of suburban villas, which would characterize the Genoese landscape for centuries, began in the 13th century, when the first dwellings of wealthy citizens, linked to the presence of agricultural land, were built in suburban areas alongside the numerous monastic settlements. The oldest villas had a simple architectural structure and overlooked gardens, vegetable gardens and orchards enclosed by high walls with high porticoes. Among the oldest (13th century) suburban residences is the one that belonged to
Doge Simon Boccanegra on the hill of S. Tecla in San Martino, which has recently been renovated. Located today within the perimeter of the San Martino hospital complex, after years of neglect it was restored in 2005 and is now used as a venue for seminars and conferences. Due to the difficulties of transportation at the time, summer residences were mainly built in the hilly and coastal areas immediately outside the
city walls, particularly those most suitable for the development of agricultural land. This proximity meant that, as early as the 14th century, the city and its suburbs appeared to those arriving in Genoa from the sea as one large area dotted with sumptuous villas and gardens, as witnessed by illustrious travelers, including
Petrarch. The trend of vacationing gave rise to a real competition among the aristocratic families to build sumptuous villas that would be admired even by illustrious travelers, calling on the best architects of the time to design them, first and foremost
Galeazzo Alessi from
Perugia, one of the protagonists of the Genoese cultural renewal in the 16th century.
Alessandro Magnasco's art has left us a snapshot of the life and environment in which the wealthy society spent its vacations in the first half of the 18th century. In the painting
Garden Party in Albaro (1735), preserved in
Palazzo Bianco, one can see small groups of people in a garden (identified as that of Villa Saluzzo Bombrini in Albaro), talking, dancing and playing cards, against the backdrop of the Bisagno plain, in the area of San Fruttuoso, which was still cultivated with vegetable gardens. This villa in Albaro, known to the Genoese as Villa Paradiso, was the residence of
Fabrizio de André as a young man. Many of his early ballads were written and first sung in a small room on the ground floor that the singer had chosen as his "den". hill, other villas stand out. At the end of the 18th century, the interest in botany spread among the most educated aristocrats and led many of them to introduce exotic plants from all over the world in their gardens, giving rise to the first botanical gardens. In the Genoa area, the most famous are the one founded by Ippolito Durazzo on the bastion of Santa Caterina (today Villetta Di Negro) and
the one founded by
Clelia Durazzo Grimaldi in Pegli, today integrated in the park of the
Villa Durazzo-Pallavicini, built in the 19th century by Ignazio Pallavicini.
19th and 20th centuries The wealthy entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, which became the new ruling class in the nineteenth century, had elegant villas built, especially in the eastern part and on the heights of the historic center, but they did not reach the splendor of the patrician villas, although there were exceptions. One of them is the park of
Villa Durazzo-Pallavicini in Pegli, designed by
Michele Canzio for the Marquis Ignazio Pallavicini. Open to the public from the beginning, it was an extraordinary success among its contemporaries. opposed in vain by the last representatives of the aristocracy associated with them. The villas themselves were often incorporated into the productive fabric as office and storage buildings, and in many cases suffered irreversible degradation. In the twentieth century, subdivisions, real estate speculation and changes of use led to the disappearance of many historic villas and the complete abandonment of others. However, what remains of this immense architectural heritage allows the visitor, despite the deterioration of the buildings, to perceive the former splendor of those holiday homes that characterized the Genoese landscape for centuries. == Historic villas ==