[1][2][3][4] In the early 20th century, the villa was sold by the Acquarone family to the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and it became a renowned educational and cultural center.

The original part of the villa, dating to the early 17th century as the maps of the period,[5] as well as the vaulted entrance and the decorated ceilings of the piano nobile suggest, was built as a suburban villa near the 16th century church of Saint Anne, alongside the steep walkway (Italian: salita; Ligurian: crêuza) linking Portello to Mura delle Chiappe, midway in between the Barbarossa Walls and the 17-century New Walls, giving impulse to the urbanization of an area that used to be rural at the time.

[8] In the last decade of the century, the villa and its owner, Pietro Acquarone, II Count d'Acquarone, played a key role in the establishment of the economically and culturally active Via Acquarone neighborhood, to the north of the 19th-century Circonvallazione a Monte (Italian for "mountain ringway"), which reduced the size of the park to make way to the edification of low-rise residential buildings in the newly constructed Corso Paganini.

Urban expansion to the north of Ponte Caffaro, however, could not take place without the edification at the lower end of the park of the villa of a high wall to support the access road, a risky undertaking for the technology of the time.

[15] The educational complex was expanded in 1934–38 with the edification of a rationalist annex connected to the villa though an underground passage under Salita Bachernia commissioned by Sister Francesca Saverio Savona M.S.C.