Bordighera: Bicknell museum [Photo gallery]

The Museum recalls the name of its founder, the Englishman Clarence Bicknell (1842-1918), who had it built between 1886 and 1888 according to a design by the English architect Clarence Tait and the Sanremese Giovenale Gastaldi.

[Credit Facebook site]

The building, preceded by two extraordinary specimens of ficus macrophylla and a romantic wisteria clinging to its façade, has a rectangular plan with an entrance portico and an apse on the opposite side. Inside it still retains its original atmosphere and many testimonies that refer to its founder, an eclectic personality of great stature. Here there are the two jars painted with floral motifs with Esperanto inscriptions; a collection of butterflies that has many specimens, both local and exotic; the extraordinary herbarium, which includes almost 13,000 sheets of dried plants and flowers from the Riviera and the Maritime Alps; calques, photos and drawings of the rock carvings of Monte Bego and Valle delle Meraviglie, of which the scholar provided the first complete catalogue. And also a collection of archaeological finds from the nearby Roman city of Albintimilium, the modern Ventimiglia; the book collection, which includes numerous guides of the period, and the extraordinary naturalistic nucleus, which formed the basis of the studies accomplished on the flora and fauna of the place.

The Museum also contains an important art collection, made up of paintings and watercolors made by Bicknell himself and by the main artists and painters of vedutas resident in the Riviera, his contemporaries: Hermann Nestel, Giuseppe Ferdinando Piana, Friedrich von Kleudgen, Richard West, Filiberto Minozzi .

Via Romana, 39 - Bordighera (IM)

+39 0184 263694 - fax +39 0184 266421 bicknell@istitutostudiliguri.191.it - ​​www.iisl.it

Visiting hours: Monday 9.00 am - 5.00 pm; Tuesday - Thursday 9.00 am - 4.00 pm; Saturday 1.00pm - 5.00pm (or on request for groups over 10 people).

Admission: full € 3.00; reduced € 2.00 (groups of at least 5 people, IISL members, over 65); schools € 2.00; under 12 free