The Fai restores the garden of Lerici, in the places of Byron and Shelley
With an investment of approximately 3.5 million euros (of which 2 million from the Pnrr and additional funding from private individuals and companies), the Fai - Fondo per l'ambiente italiano, has completed the restoration of the English garden of Villa Rezzola in Lerici (La Spezia), one of the most beautiful on the Riviera di Levante, overlooking the Gulf of Poets, which takes its name from two great exponents of Anglo-Saxon literature, George Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelly, who loved it.
Villa Rezzola is an ancient residence, with a large park and a long history: documented since the sixteenth century, inhabited by local nobles in the nineteenth century, in 1900 it was purchased by a wealthy English couple, the Cochranes, who adapted the villa to their style and, above all, gave the park the shape of a typical English garden, which it still retains. Sold in 1935 to Countess Mara Braida Carnevale, during the Second World War it was requisitioned by the army and used as the headquarters of the military command, first Italian, by Aimone d'Aosta, and then German, by Rudolf Jacobs, a navy captain who went over to the partisans and died as a hero of the Resistance on the heights of Sarzana.
From the daughter of Countess Carnevale, Maria Adele, known as Pupa, who lived there with her husband, Piero Miniati, the villa was left as a legacy to the Fai in 2020 "so that it could be restored, enhanced and opened to many visitors"; and so that it could be well maintained, thanks also to a generous dowry that accompanies the testamentary bequest, consisting of real estate assets in Rome and Lerici.
With an investment of approximately 2.3 million euros, compared to a contribution of 2 million received from the Ministry of Culture, as part of the Pnrr ( Programs to enhance the identity of places: historic parks and gardens ), the Fai has restored and redeveloped 1.5 hectares of green areas around the villa, which have been open to visitors again for a few days. This intervention was accompanied by 1.2 million euros of investments, to complete the recovery of balustrades, stairs and belvedere, to restore and adapt the entrance farmhouse, where the ticket office and shop are located, and to create other reception services for the public and cultural ones, as well as to secure the exterior of the villa and illuminate the garden.
Furthermore, the Fai is raising funds to start a new construction site that will complete, in the coming years, the restoration of the park and, above all, of the villa, from the systems to the interiors, from the decorations to the collections of furniture, objects and documents, up to the addition of further recreational and cultural services. In any case, in parallel with the restoration of the garden, the Fai has already completed some work on the interiors of the villa, in particular on the ground floor, which can already be visited in its entirety.
The tour allows you to appreciate the rooms characterised by the typical English taste of the Cochranes at the beginning of the twentieth century and winds through the entrance and the atrium, the lounge, which leads to the large panoramic terrace overlooking the sea with a view of the Gulf of Poets, the dining room, with the ceiling decorated with neo-Gothic motifs (which are also found in the leaded windows of the entrance), the small sitting room, with furnishings, objects and memories of the Carnevale family, two small studies dedicated respectively to Maria Adele Carnevale and Piero Miniati and, finally, the library or music room, with the wooden panelling, the herringbone parquet and the bow windows extending outwards.
Thanks to the contribution of the Pnrr and in collaboration with the University of Genoa and the University of Insubria, Fai has also launched a study campaign in 2022 that has allowed for a deeper understanding of Villa Rezzola, its history, its park, the people who lived there and the historical and cultural context in which it is located. Also noteworthy is the study of the flora and fauna of the garden, carried out with the aim of increasing biodiversity.
The garden of Villa Rezzola, in fact, as mentioned, is a typical English garden of the Riviera, rich in species like a botanical garden, with a landscape that seems spontaneous but is artfully constructed, in which more formal spaces, of an Italian garden, alternate with other, more informal, in which paths wind through the apparently wild woods, where nymphaeums, stairways and monumental belvederes appear.
A characteristic of the garden, which denotes the experience of the English in this field, are the infrastructures, functional to an efficient management of the area, which today prove to be useful and sustainable from an environmental point of view: a large greenhouse, a shade house, a seedbed (which houses 18 photovoltaic panels) and a water system that captures, stores and distributes water, through a dense network of canals, connected to basins, cisterns and fountains.
At the beginning of May, the Fai had completed another restoration project in Liguria: the reorganization, with a view to environmental protection, of the Podere Lovara, near Punta Mesco (Levanto), one of the places sung by the poet Eugenio Montale.
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