The parks of Nervi are an important botanical complex in Genoa made up of three parks belonging previously to private villas: villa Gropallo, villa Saluzzo Serra and villa Grimaldi Fassio, now owned by the Municipality of Genoa and used as modern art musem. The parks are protected by the Italian law (Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code).

The turning point for the parks was the 1800s, when the fashion of informal English gardens induced the three owner families to transform the agricultural areas belonging to the valley of the villas into landscape parks with land modelling, large flower beds determined by the passage of sinuous paths and even a private zoo.
The native vegetation gives way to exotic tree species that have now become fashionable.

The wealth of green parks and the Ligurian Riviera benefited from the competition between the noble families, so much so that many of these plants became common in both private and public gardens.
The visual perspective from the villas towards the sea, the views of the landscape, the views from the directions of the paths towards the vegetation are studied in an organic and conscious design, although not documented by historical project plans.

The interventions common to the three parks are aimed at conserving and recovering the historical structure and scenographic features of the parks from a philological point of view through the reconstruction of the visual frameworks, the creation of plant scenes, the reintegration of the elements or isolated groups of trees, the recovery or reintegration of hedges and ground cover vegetation of the shaded areas and the renovation of the meadows.

The restoration of the parks takes into account three critical issues unrelated to the parks in their original form, namely the presence of the railway, and specifically the recent legislation that regulates the railway compliance zones, the presence of recently introduced serious plant diseases, and the public use of parks designed for a totally private use.

The enhancement of the scenographic aspects of the parks will highlight the beauty of the plant compositions and the individual elements and the relationship between the villas and the sea in an alternation of perspective views, openings and shaded closures.

At present, the residual tree masses appear to be in very poor conditions. Particularly intense weather events in October 2016 and October 2018, the presence of imported plant diseases and the lack of ordinary and extraordinary maintenance were the cause of numerous trees being cut down which is why the restoration project includes an organic renewal plan and tree management on a five-year basis.

In the first year of works (2020) we planted 82 new trees and carried out 208 VTA (Visual Tree Assessment).

In the second year of works (2021) we planted 40 new trees and 100 shrubs, and carried out 221 VTA (Visual Tree Assessment).

Thanks to the collaboration with ISCUM (Institute of the History of Material Culture), in the park of Villa Serra were carried out a dendrochronological study on the Cedrus Libani tree stump. It was thus possible to establish the year in which it was planted in the Parks, i.e. 1877. On the stump it is realized a time line in which significant tree rings correspond to events in the history of Genoa, Italy and the world.