The site on the Vomero ridge was bought by King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies in 1815 and given to Lucia Migliaccio, Duchess of Floridia, the morganatic wife he had married in 1814. The estate took the duchess’s title and became the Villa Floridiana. Between 1817 and 1819 Antonio Niccolini, architect of the Bourbon Real Casa and a leading neoclassical designer in Naples, rebuilt the existing Pignatelli core into a restrained white neoclassical villa, organised around a central body and symmetrical wings opening toward the gulf. Niccolini also planned the layout of the surrounding grounds, intended both as a private royal residence and as a stage from which to read the city below.

The park was developed in the English landscape manner by Friedrich Dehnhardt, director of the Naples Botanical Garden, who introduced more than one hundred species of trees and shrubs — oaks, pines, cypresses, palms, plane trees and an extensive camellia collection — laid out along winding paths, lawns and viewpoints. The original complex once included a second residence (Villa Lucia), a small Ionic temple, an outdoor theatre known as the Teatro della Verzura, fountains, artificial ruins and greenhouses. The today’s visitable park covers roughly eight hectares of the original estate and culminates in a long belvedere over the Bay of Naples, with Vesuvius on the horizon.

Following the end of the Bourbon era and successive subdivisions, the villa and remaining park passed to the Italian State in the early twentieth century. The collection assembled by Placido di Sangro, Duke of Martina — more than 6,000 objects of European and Far Eastern ceramics, including Meissen, Capodimonte, Sèvres, Chinese and Japanese porcelains, ivories, enamels and majolica — had been donated to the city of Naples in 1911 by his heirs. In 1931 the collection was installed inside the Villa Floridiana, where it has remained as the Museo Nazionale della Ceramica Duca di Martina. The villa and museum are managed today by the Direzione Regionale Musei Campania, while the park is open to the public free of charge as the principal green space of the Vomero district.