An Alchemistic Promenade

To Franco Maria Ricci and everyone in his publishing house, Giuseppe Marcenaro – essayist, curator, and man of letters in the elegant, old-fashioned sense – was “the Friend from Genoa.” He wrote three books in the Quadreria series, all devoted to Genoa and its region, Liguria. He also suggested the topic of this article to us and had originally been expected to write it, until his recent and unexpected passing. In the mid-nineteenth century, in the Ligurian town of Pegli, the Marchese Ignazio Pallavicini decided to set forth his experiences and beliefs as a politician, a Freemason, and a man of his time not in words, but by means of plants, paths, small pagan temples, and rustic hermitages. As if in some initiatory ritual or alchemistic Magnum Opus, everything in his park had to be placed just so, everything had to make sense. Though Marcenaro has left this mortal coil, and the pages he was hoping to devote to Villa Pallavicini will never be written, we were unwilling to miss our appointment with him. We meet with his protoplasmic shade in a sylvan garden instead, by means of an excerpt from an 1857 essay by Amerigo Gassarini and photographs by Massimo Listri that provide a fitting vade mecum.