Page 26 - Joseph Wright of Derby: Virgils's Tomb & The Grand Tour.

his stepson and probably a major cause of his sad suicide.The house was magnificently furnished with eighteenth century
French furniture and staffed. My sister maintained a menagerie on the fifth floor with, at one time, a cheetah.The gallery
specialised in impressionists and old master and nineteenth century drawings under the watchful eye of my father.

From 1948 we had the benefit of the Hanbury villa Villino della Pergola, in Alassio, Italy for the next 20 years which to
me with its 100,000 sq.m. mature garden was an earthly paradise never equalled or regained after its loss in 1967. In
1948 my father had contracted to buy the Villino for £4000, a significant sum which would have purchased a palatial
house in London, but as the fates would have it, and no doubtVirgil would have had something apposite to say, it was
not to be. Daniel Hanbury, the son of Sir Thomas, founder of the legendary La Mortola gardens at Ventimiglia, died
suddenly having contracted a cold and subsequent pneumonia at Wimbledon and the estate was entailed in trust.
Smitten by the decaying romance of the Villino we thus proceeded to rent for two decades.18 My parents entertained
there a wide and eclectic mix of guests down the years. We had the benefit of a devoted and much loved pair of
septuagenarian Piedmontese guardian angels, Maria and Lucia (Maria being a consummate cook and Lucia the
housekeeper) and, from the late 1950s, Ida who still survives today in a ‘home’ run by nuns. Thus, we were visited
regularly, amongst many others, by Avv. Ferrari from Turin, an important ‘runner’, by Nino Faerber as well as Ruth
Kay (Whyte) who is the last person alive to have held me as a new-born and who made my father’s drawings’ mounts;
by Prince and Princess Leopold Lowenstein, David and Pat Dear and family, a diplomat and Tory central office party
persona, Mimi and Geiga Bazzi, art restorer and violinist from Milan whose friendship with my papa went back before
WWII and who were both extremely active in the Resistance,Victor and Katherine Ross (Victor was a great favourite
of mine who entrusted himself to my driving in my 1936 Fiat Topolino, mischievous and an artist who had developed
camouflage inWWII), and the inimitable Godfrey and Elsa Bonsack (‘King of Bathrooms at the time’) who, possessed
of a Cadillac with fins, in the early ‘50s wowed the locals and indeed on one expedition proved to be the first ever
foreign vehicle seen in a neighbouring hill village,Testico, where to mark the event they cut boughs from the fig trees
and strewed them in front of this mythical vehicle screaming‘Benvenuti Americani’ as if it was Christ entering Jerusalem.
From time to time we had a favourite taxi driver, Nicola Gandolfi, son of our favourite carozzella coachman, who was
hired to take us up into the hinterland with our guests.There we would disport ourselves bathing ‘in the buff’ in the
Arroscia, a mountain river’s rock pools, baby trout nibbling our toes, chubby Bonsack playing Tarzan whooping and
beating his breasts atop a rock. The location of this annual fixture was beneath the abandoned ‘400 church of San
Pantaleo (affectionately nicknamed by us all as San Pantalone or ‘The Saint without trousers’ which was highly

18. The gardens were a magical and terrestrial paradise full of enchantment, terraces, ramps, colonnades, hidden stairs, ponds, fountains.They had been
initially laid out by GeneralWilliam Montagu Scott McMurdo, a veteran of the Crimea and the Villino built in Anglo-Italian style with copious
verandas. In 1912 the estate was made over to SirWalter Hamilton-Dalrymple, a Scottish baron, who proceeded to extend and plant the gardens as a
rival to La Mortola. In 1922, Sir Hew Clifford Hamilton-Dalrymple made the residence over to Daniel Hanbury, second son of SirThomas Hanbury
della Mortola.The head gardener, Filippo, whom I knew as an old man when a child, was responsible for planting the seedlings of the more than 100
cyprus trees and palms on the estate. In the 1980s the estate was bought by a local speculator and fell on hard times the garden becoming a wilderness.
Between 2008 and 2012 the estate was restored and is being replanted by Sylvia and Antonio Ricci, who have miraculously saved it from speculators.
See Un sogno inglese in riviera. Le stagioni diVilla della Pergola,A. Bartoli, (Mondadori 2012).

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