THE GARDEN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

In the first decades of the century, the sea garden of the palace kept unaltered the structure inherited from the previous century. This geometric design of the garden only started to be tampered with towards the middle of the century, when the Princess Doria (née Talbot), wife of Filippo Andrea V, began the process of bringing the family gardens up to date in accordance with the Roman taste for the “English” park, now widely popular and particularly befitting the cultural background of the noblewoman.

The first transformation took place between 1853 and 1855, and the result was a compromise solution between the innovative ideas of the princess and the cultural “resistance” of the Genoese gardeners, still utterly tied to the formal tradition.

Between the end of 1855 and 1857 was realized a plan for a romantic park imposed from Rome, which just maintained the centrality of the Fountain of Neptune, but deliberately cancelled the symmetry axes followed by previous layouts, the opening up to the sun and to the sight of visitors, imposing snaking paths along little avenues, the moving of the sculptural decorations and their disposition in Arcadian settings, protected by the evergreen penumbra of the groves.

This is an expression of the epoch, by way of the inclusion of a large number of species of exotic evergreen trees, largely imported from America. For the garden up the hill the princes commissioned from the architect Cervetto a plan for a vast neo-classical building, which was to have included apartments for themselves and others for letting to tenants.

The building was never constructed, however. The garden was irremediably compromised, in the middle of the century, by the construction of the Genoa-Turin railway, which led to the loss of the first level of the garden itself, consisting of the celebrated “cuba”, the pergola positioned in front of the piano nobile of the palace.

The continuing levelling of the Granarolo hill and the subsequent intense building of houses, as well as the Hotel Miramare (1913), caused the total obliteration of the northern garden, of which today remain just a few ruined traces.