Pietro Agosti

Pietro Agosti, engineer and politician (Bordighera 1873 – Rome 1930). His father, Giuseppe, born in Costellazzo di Alessandria, a railroad employee who was sent to Bordighera when the section from Genoa to Ventimiglia had come into operation, married Caterina Amoretti there. He was then, for a long time, stationmaster in Ospedaletti. The son, Peter, graduated in civil engineering on 3/9/1896. He had his first job the following year, when he was called to replace architect Maurizio Dufour, who died while completing the construction of the Bussana Vecchia Shrine, in which the young engineer Agosti made the portal, Don Lombardi’s tomb and the small temple of the Bambin di Praga. In 1897 he designed the Hotel de Paris and in 1899, after keeping abreast of what was being built on the French Riviera, the Hotel Savoy. With the new century, he began a period of great activity that led him to realize: Palazzo Ascquasciati in Via Matteoti, Villa Rothemburg (now Joan of Arc), Villa Maya, Villa Guardiole, Villa Caravadossi, Villa Agnese (now Villa Vista Lieta), Devachan Castle, Villa Spinola (now Villa King), Russian Church, numerous renovations of existing buildings, including. Villa Zirio and Hotel Bellevue, without neglecting, in the meantime, public activity: he was Commissioner for the Protection of Public Property in the Ponente, and, from 1908 to 1913, city councilor. Outside San Remo he participated in the construction of the Grand Hotel in Saint Vincent and the Rhul in Nice. In 1910 he won the national competition for the new Municipal Palace in Messina. In 1913 he designed the San Secondo Orphanage in Ventimiglia for free. The outbreak of World War I obviously marked a halt for construction activity, which continued in San Remo long after the end of hostilities, due to the disappearance of the wealthy foreign colonies that had fueled it. To find an accomplishment of Pietro Agosti, we have to wait until 1927, when he executed free of charge, the project for the Children’s Home of the ‘Pro Infanzia Institute. In the same year, at the age of fifty-four, he accepted the post of San Remo’s first Podestà, in an attempt to lift the city out of the deep crisis into which it had plunged. Asked for and obtained from the government technical means, that is, formal and final concession to the Municipal Casino of the license for gambling, hitherto only tolerated, often suspended, and consequently financial, studied and gave practical start to the largest program of public works San Remo ever had, will have in the future. It was from those years: the purchase of the Gardens and Villa Ormond, with construction of the new pavilion and adaptation of the garden to a public park, with construction of the joining road with the seaside promenade, now Villa Nobel. By Pietro Agosti is the design of the vast fountain, the realization of the Golf Course, the start of work on the Multi-Sports Field on a design commissioned from engineer Domenico Parodi, with ornamental sculptures in the Littorio style, by Vincenzo Pasquali, the assignment for design and construction of the San Remo cable car – St. Romulus-Mount Bignone, with the longest span in Europe, the planned for the new Hospital, the agreement for the San Remo Equestrian Field, the covering of the San Francesco Creek, now Via Bartolomeo Asquasciati, entry of a seaplane service to Milan and Munich. His professional activity records, in those years, the Deco-style facade of the Central Cinema Theater and the project for the Elementary Schools on Via Volta, which were left unfinished. On April 29, 1930, in Rome, where he had gone to speak with the Duce and refute causes that had been brought against him, after waiting in vain for three days to be received, he killed himself, with a revolver shot, in the Catacombs of San Callisto. He had solemn funerals in San Remo where to this day one of the most central streets still bears his name. He is buried in the Ospedaletti Cemetery.