The villa risen from its ashes

Villa Spinola, today "Hotel Villa King", was built in 1909 in Sanremo in Corso Cavallotti on land given as a gift by the Ormond family and designed by the engineer Pietro Agosti as a propter nuptias gift from the Saxon Baron Adolph von Thiem, banker and patron of the arts (about Villa Virginia and Villa Noseda), offered to her daughter Martha who, barely forty years old, had been widowed in 1906 by her first husband, a nobleman from Pomerania and general of the Prussian army, and who in 1908 had stayed in Venice with Marquis Francesco Spinola di Taggia, cousin of Duke Borea d'Olmo, who would leave her widowed again after only four years.

The villa is considered one of the most important testimonies of the eclectic style that characterized the architecture in the west of Liguria and the nearby French Riviera at the turn of the century and until the First World War.

The villa is characterised by a typically Art Nouveau style particularly evident in the rustication and exposed bricks, which are harmoniously combined with the artistic decorations of the attic, the ornamental columns placed at the corners of the building and the marble frames of the windows.
Also worthy of note is the façade facing the sea with the part that protrudes from the main body marked by an asymmetrical position with respect to the rest of the front.

In particular, the structure of the building evokes, in the double wall ornamentation in ashlar and terracotta, the sobriety of the small foreign country houses, while the decorative nuances of the attic and the supporting pillars with neo-paleocristian capitals, in addition to the marble decorations, are in perfect harmony with the singular richness of the contemporary architectural achievements of the city.

Its recent history

The cadastral vicissitudes of the property derive in part from mourning and other family misfortunes, but above all from the outbreak of the First World War, and therefore from the status of subjects of the surviving owners' belligerent states and later from its nature as property of former enemies, even though the owner had acquired dual citizenship when she married an Italian.

It is for this reason that from a "buen retiro" of the high Prussian aristocracy already in the Thirties it became a luxury "resort" that had only twenty-two rooms but was economically profitable, which, despite several changes in ownership, allowed it to maintain all its artistic and architectural features and the same furniture until 1985, the year of the final closure of the hotel management and the offer of sale at a basic price of two billion lire.

In 1988, with a discount of eight hundred million lire, the villa was sold to a speculative real estate company whose project to transform it into mini housing was temporarily blocked by the town planning councillor of the time, motivating him with the violation of the hotel bond.
Without a clear position from the Superintendence of Environmental and Architectural Heritage of Liguria, on 16th September 1989 they obtained the building permit.

Following several protests and requests for intervention, the Superintendence organised an initial inspection of the park in 1990, after which, in February 1991, it carried out a thorough inspection that led it to open the historical-artistic investigation that was essential to be able to legitimately bind the property.
The consequence was that, in mid-October 1991, she informed the Municipality of Sanremo of her decision to bind the villa and formally invited it to block any contrary determination on the matter.

By coincidence, a couple of weeks later, on 4 November 1991, in the evening, some passers-by warned the fire brigade that flames were spreading in the lobby.
Inside the villa, the wooden coffered ceilingInterior of the villa, fireplace and balconyThe resulting fire, outside the building incinerated the beams of part of the roof and an inlaid wooden balcony of fine workmanship, but did worse inside where the action of the flames produced the most damage, destroying the wooden staircase, the atrium, the attic floor with the chapel, and much of the boisserie of the false ceilings.

Subsequent investigations did not lead to any results and the whole thing was shelved in 1993.

In the meantime, in 1992, when the damage was already done, the Minister declared the villa and its park to be of "particularly important interest" and the following month of April the Superintendence would attach the historical and artistic report to the Ministerial Decree and both documents would be transcribed at the Conservatory of Real Estate Registers with extended effectiveness to future owners, owners or holders in any capacity.

At this point the Property, not giving up, in 1997 tried to get around the block by proposing, taking advantage of condoning laws and formal approval by the Municipality with logical but twisted reasoning, to transform the 22 hotel rooms into an extra-luxury resort of 10 flats, This proposal was accepted, but on the very expensive condition that the facades, friezes and all the other features of the building were restored and preserved, starting with the renovation of the slate roof at an estimated cost of no less than 250 million lire at the time.

After five years of inertia, the company decided to put the property up for sale with the building permit, the project and the ministerial consent, but it was faced with the so-called "cultural pre-emption", a legal institution that gave the State and the territorial public bodies under its jurisdiction the right to purchase the cultural assets sold for consideration at the same price established in the deed of sale with precedence over any other buyer.

In spite of this, in July 2002, the Administration waived its right of pre-emption in the sale of the control package of the owner company, equal to 60% of the capital, which had been proposed to it by the Superintendence on 20 June 2002 at a derisory price of 289.215 euros.

It seems clear that the City of Sanremo had to renounce to a heritage formed not only by the historical-environmental aspects mentioned so far, but also by the exceptional importance of the building and the surrounding park for their strategic position, deriving from the adjacent cycle path (which replaces the old railway route), the Salvo D'Acquisto promenade below, and the parks of Villa Nobel and Villa Ormond, with the prospect of being able to recompose and make public a green lung of rare beauty.

The private real estate use, however, after so many years has remained unfinished and who knows for how many more years, or decades, it will continue to be so.

(sources: texts by Andrea Gandolfo, Bruno Giri (note dated 01/2016); images from private archives)