Umberto Pier, View of Castle Brown

When one speaks of the Castle Brown it is normal to think immediately of Portofino, however, few know that the castle in Paraggi also belonged to the Browns. Timothy Yeats Brown, originally of a Scotch family, following the romantic footsteps of the poets Byron and Shelly, came to Italy, to Portovenere where he lived on the island of Palmaria.

When he was named consol of the United Kingdom to Genoa, he moved here with his family and raised his children who, while being British citizens felt Genoese in sentiment and loved Portofino. The oldest boy, Montagu, became console of S. M. Britannica when his father died. The second boy, Federico, was a great industrialist and businessman of the end of the nineteenth century.

TheVilla DurazzoinSanta Margherita Ligure,the oldest residence on this coast was in the Middle Ages the monasteries. There were as guests important personages visiting the area. In the XVth century grand palaces of illustrious Genoese families and, later, especially in the XIXth century, elegant residences, successively turned into hotels, were built. This brief study takes us next into the environment where the personalities that constitute the third part of this publication reside. There is no intention to advertise for commercial purposes, an inappropriate objective for a study of this kind. We would instead direct our attention towards these splendid palaces for purely historical motives. Of some of these, we will note the causes of their construction, rise, development, and in some cases decline. We have no ambition to write anything new. We want to gather in one text a summary of what has been amply treated in a variety of works whose worth we refer to in the bibliography.

The Monastery of Cervara found halfway between Santa Margherita and Portofino, is an important complex that in the middle ages received many illustrious guests who were traveling along the Dolphins coast. The name of the monastery derives from the Cervara family who were the proprietors of a good deal of land in the area.

We include the Villa Spinola, foto above, among the grandiose residences of the Portofino Coast even though technically from an administrative standpoint it is not a part of it being instead in the city of Rapallo.

However, as I have already noted elsewhere, it was constructed right on point where Portofino Coast begins and thus I have elected to consider it. The point of Pagana has always constituted the border between Rapallo and the western part of the gulf. In the sisteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the danger of incursions by pirates, whether from the Barbari Coast, France, or Spain, was at its highest, the Republic furnished the coast with a series of strategically positioned guard towers. They were also used to block any unauthorized landings not checked for contraband.

The villa Costa Lo Faro, in a floral style whose tower is visible from almost every part of Santa Margherita Ligure, is a “historic villa” that constructed in 1898 by Giuseppe Costa. The design is by Antonio Revelli, same architect who realized the facade the sanctuary of Mon tallegro. In addition to the original owners who lit there at first before moving to Genoa, fir villa has been the home of a number important names in Roman nobilit. Among these were the Centurione family, and then from 1912 to 1917, the princess Colonna di Stiliano, who was president of the Italian Red Cross. Due to the financial problems of Giuseppe Costa, the villa was sold to the Lo Faro brothers in 1922. Their father, a musician of Sicilian origin, came to Genoa for the festivities celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America in 1892.