The History of Villa Cambiaso

A distinguished historic residence, listed among Italy’s national monuments, where history has made its entrance leaving important memories and testimonies.

The first documented information on the building now known as Villa Cambiaso dates back to the sixteenth century. In 1530 a house with a garden facing the church of San Lazzaro was the property of Ambrogio Ferrero, who used it as a country residence. The dating, however, thanks also to the discovery of some majolica tiles, could be brought forward to the end of the fifteenth century. The history of the villa in the seventeenth century is very well documented. In 1623 – when three Carmelite nuns stayed there for six months – the “garden house of Francesco Ferrero, near San Francesco da Paola” is welcoming and has a chapel in which “to officiate” (G.V. Verzellino). In 1655 the palace was renovated and raised by a storey. That year the Genoese nobleman Luca Spinola moved there and “at his own expense had many comforts made, to enjoy them as long as he and his wife lived, and then leave them as a gift to the aforementioned Ferrero” (Ibidem).

At the end of the eighteenth century the villa was owned by the Spinola family. Two years earlier, on the night between 10 and 11 April 1796, Napoleon Bonaparte stayed in the palace before the battle of Montenotte.
Around the year 1800 ownership of the building passed to Paolo Vincenzo Agostino Colonna. In the early nineteenth century the villa was at the centre of events linked to the imprisonment of Pius VII in Savona. In April 1809 the wife and three daughters of General Berthier, charged by Napoleon with guarding the Pope, arrived at the palace. In the same year – on the occasion of the pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Mercy on 2 September – Pius VII himself stopped at the villa and prayed in the private chapel. The ties between Pope Chiaramonti and the palace, now owned by the Colonna, are significant: he granted three privileges to the chapel (in 1809, 1810 and 1814) and, in 1822, on the occasion of the wedding between Bianca Maria Caterina Colonna and Marquis Giovanni Battista Cambiaso, he donated the fountain that now adorns the entrance hall.
The villa passed from the Colonna to the Cambiaso family in 1842, the year Bianca Maria Caterina died. In the nineteenth century the villa suffered some damage, first from the flood of 19 August 1858 and then from the earthquake of 23 February 1887. From 1921 to 1924 Villa Cambiaso was turned into barracks. In 1928 restoration work began which gave the building its present form. The last descendant of the Cambiaso family (G.B. Giuseppe De Majo, son of Rosa Pierina Cambiaso) sold it to the artist Pio Vintera in August 1986. The villa reopened the following year.