Villa della Pergola

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The Dalrymples kept the property of the Villa for about twenty years, then, in 1922, Sir Hew Clifford Hamilton-Dalrymple made the residence over to Daniel Hanbury, second son of Sir Thomas Hanbury della Mortola.
After Sir Thomas's death, in 1907, the Villa and the "Giardini della Mortola" had been inherited by his eldest son Cecil, who had been engaged in the family business activities in Shanghais, while Daniel had continued looking after his father's real estate business in Alassio - in particular the management of the Tennis Club, the British Club, the Norfolk Hotel and the numerous villas which his father got built on the Alassio's hills. Thomas Hanbury had foreseen Alassio's potential as a winter resort, figuring out the same fortune as Bordighera, Mentone and San Remo. The Hanbury family completed the gardens of the Villa, enriching them with a great variety of exotic plants, brought in from the botanic gardens of the "Mortola".
In 1940, at the breaking of the war, the Hanbury family went back to England, like most of the English living in the Riviera. Daniel, after his first wife's death, married Ruth Hardinge, a noblewoman belonging herself to an English family of Alassio who had been forced to return to homeland during the war. In 1946 Daniel suddenly died and his death marked the decline of Alassio as a winter resort for the English.
Ruth went back to live in the "Villa della Pergola" and surrounded herself with a very small group of English noblemen. She became well-known for her spring parties, given during the flowering of the glycine pergolas. Among her guests were Sir Cecil Roberts, who would dedicate his book "Portal to Paradise" to Alassio, and the bishop of Gibraltar, who paid visit to the Anglican communities in Alassio every spring.
In 1925 Alfred Hitchcock shot some scenes of his first movie "The pleasure garden" in the park of the Villa and in 1957 the Oscar awarded Guy Green set his movie "The Snorkel" in the Villa.