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Beautiful Liguria | Article

Beautiful Liguria | By Charles Quest-Ritson author of RHS Encyclopedia of Roses and Ninfa: The Most Romantic Garden in the World

Why do so few people visit Liguria? It has everything to delight and intrigue the English visitor. On this tour we will explore the sumptuous gardens and exotic plant collections first created by Genoese nobles and rich English expats more than 100 years ago—curated, ever since, by keen and knowledgeable gardeners.

The Ligurian coast is Italy's most beautiful - a succession of rocky promontories, deep-water ports and elegant small resorts. It runs in a narrow ribbon from the frontier with Menton in France to the borders of Tuscany near the marble quarries of Carrara. The Alps rise up dramatically behind, and

protect the coastline from cold wind and rain. Sanremo, Portofino and the Cinque Terre bask in the Riviera sunshine. Our wealthy ancestors came here to spend the months from November to April in sunlight and in warmth. The hills are covered by Taggiasca olive trees, famous for the mildest, sweetest olive oil in Italy. The museum at Imperia has a fascinating record of the production of Ligurian olive oil over the ages. We shall also have a tutored tasting of Ligurian wines – much livelier than the wines over the border in Provence.

Spring arrives much earlier here than in Britain. April is high season for flowers. We shall see rare and beautiful plants in every garden. Wisteria, irises and roses will be in full bloom. After we land at Nice airport, the tour will begin with a visit to La Mortola where Sir Thomas Hanbury in 1867 started the greatest English garden on the whole Riviera. Carolyn Hanbury will tell us the story of the family over tea and panettone in her house within the twenty-acre gardens.

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We shall spend the first two nights at Villa della Pergola, above Alassio, as guests of Antonio Ricci in a sumptuous villa built by Scottish General McMurdo in 1876 and later bought by the Hanbury family. Antonio is a famous Italian broadcaster; his wife Silvia is deeply involved in the Italian equivalent of the National Trust. The garden contains forty different wisterias and the largest collection of agapanthus in the world. Part of their house has a period collection of books, paintings and commemorations relating to the English colony in Alassio.

We then go on to spend two nights on a promontory above the turquoise sea at Rapallo, where the English writer and caricaturist Sir Max Beerbohm lived for forty years. Five-star Hotel Excelsior dates back to the Belle Époque and offers modern luxury and complete relaxation.

British visitors flock to Florence, Venice and Rome, but few know the elegant and historic city of Genoa. It was a prosperous maritime republic to rival Venice, governed by its own Doge, and rich in palaces, gardens and churches that we shall explore on foot. It is the great unknown city where Christopher Columbus was born, Lord Byron lived and Oscar Wilde's wife Constance is buried. The people are hospitable and have a reputation for elegant living. Two hundred years ago, in 1825, the English art historian Anna Brownell Jameson wrote that 'Beauty is no rarity at Genoa: I think I never saw so many fine women in one place.'

One of the highlights of the tour will be a morning at the stupendous Villa Pallavicini-Durazzo, voted 'Italy's most beautiful landscaped park' whose palace, gardens, lakes, follies and underground caverns were made in the 1840s by one of Genoa's richest families. Our final visit will be Boccanegra, on the next promontory east of Mortola, where Carolyn Hanbury's best friend Ursula Piacenza has restored the garden made by famous English lady gardener Ellen Willmott. Ursula is Italy's greatest living plantswoman, so the garden has a fabulous collection of plants, old and new, with views westwards along a succession of bays and headlands: La Mortola, Menton, Monte Carlo and Nice. Sometimes you can see as far as Antibes. Eastward lies the coast of Liguria, with Ventimiglia and Bordighera in the foreground. Finally, on our way back to Nice, we shall indulge in a very special lunch - a memorable ending to a memorable tour.

Join Charles on our Liguria Tour in 2025 now!

- Country Life: Enchanted April in the Italian Riviera | 7 - 11 April 2025

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