Ruins of a castle can be seen from the vantage point of the grounds of Villa Piuma, described below.

Located on the Mediterranean Sea about 25 miles from Genoa, Italy, Sestri Levante has attracted artists (and photographers) since at least the 19th century, and surely before. In addition to painting the landscape of Villa Piuma, British watercolourist Walter Tyndale (1855-1943) recorded his observations of the area for his volume An Artist in the Riviera published in 1915:

Let us return to Sestri Levante, where no one more formidable than a small boy is likely to interrupt one’s occupation.

A whole day of the smallest boys is, nevertheless, a trying ordeal, and I was glad to find a spot from which they were excluded. This I found in the beautiful grounds of the Villa Piuma. The house is situated on the peninsula, where the town ceases to climb its slopes. It commands a view of the busy strand with a sweep of the coast till it reaches the promontory of Portofino, Lavagna and Chiavari intervening. The gardens near the house are kept in good order; but as one reaches the higher levels, cypress-bordered walks, the ilex groves, and the noble clusters of pines have been allowed to grow as Nature pleases. The grounds extend round two-thirds of the peninsula, the path in places skirting the edge of the precipitous cliffs and circling the Campo Santo upon the highest point of the headland.

The Marchese Piuma kindly allows (when he is not in residence) the visitors to Sestri Levante to make use of his grounds, and as they are equidistant from the two hotels it is a great boon to those who spend part of the winter in either; to artists especially, whether they wish to make studies of the imposing cliffs, of distant views of sea and coast, or of a semi-wild and picturesque Italian garden. There are the remains of an old castle, without which any promontory on this coast would be incomplete; and adjacent, although just out of the grounds, stands a picturesque twelfth-century little church. (1.)

Photographer Franz Goerke may have taken this photograph in the Fall of 1898, when he is known to have been photographing in Italy as part of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land for the inauguration of the Church of the Redeemer in Jerusalem.

1. Excerpt: Walter Tyndale: An Artist in the Riviera- Sestri Levante, Hearst’s International Library Company, New York, 1915, pp. 90-91