C.resce and renew the network of Great Italian Gardensthe network of the most beautiful gardens in Italy. And in 2022, it welcomes in the circuit five new entriesmasterpieces of beauty and symbolic meaning, each for a different reason.
Grandi Giardini Italiani, the idea of the lady in love with Italy
The idea of introduce the public to the most beautiful parks and gardens in Italy came, 25 years ago, to Judith Wade. Australian by birth, but raised in England, the “lady of the gardens” as it was defined, it arrived in Italy in the 1990s. And she fell so in love with the “green beauties” of the beautiful country, that she decided it was right to make them known to the whole world.
He then founded the “Great Italian Gardens” with the aim of promoting the cultural heritage of the gardens of Italy. A heritage that currently counts 147 of these wonders for which a trip is always worthwhile.
Judith Wade: “Beauty that consoles”
“2022 will give prestige to Italian gardens the definitive consecration as places of pleasure and consolation from the daily worries »emphasizes Mrs. Wade. Convinced that never before is the time for leisure in contact with greenery, immersed in the beauty that consoles and helps to grow in awareness.
«Two years of the pandemic have taught us to truly appreciate what we considered an Italian heritage that was always available. And whose role we understood only when it was denied us. The gardens will offer post-pandemic revival food for the spirit of the Italians and visitors to our nation ”.
Great Italian gardens, the 5 new “green” entries
Returning to the 5 new entries, these are: Villa of Montruglionear Vicenza, in the Veneto region, Villa Bell’Aspetto in Nettuno, in Lazio, Villa Rezzola in Lerici, in Liguria, the Garden of the Impossible on the island of Favignana, in Sicily, and the Library of Treesthe most recent garden built in Milan.
Villa of Montruglio
Villa of Montruglio “Pigafetta-Camerini”on the Berici Hills 18 km from Vicenza, is one of the great historical gardens of the Veneto between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Work of Muttoni, it is surrounded by a large lawn overlooking the landscape, an orchard and a nineteenth-century park of cedars of Lebanon, holm oaks, oaks and cypresses. In the south-facing valley behind the garden, there is a 10-hectare vineyard that produces fine wines with the same name as the villa.
Villa Bell’Aspetto
Villa Bell’Aspetto.
It is a few decades earlier Villa Bell’Aspetto in Nettuno (Rome), designed in 1647 by the architect Antonio de Rossi on the heights overlooking the sea. The purchase in the 1830s by Camillo Borghese and Paolina Bonaparte led to important changes to the villa. But the park has remained the same, amidst informal woods and a very formal Italian garden.
Villa Rezzola
Look at the sea of the Gulf of Poets in Eastern Liguria, Villa Rezzola in Lerici, stately property documented since the eighteenth century. In a spectacular panoramic position, it has undergone changes over the centuries, especially since 1900, when it was bought by the British Helen Lavinia and William Percy Cochrane.
Thirty-five years later it passed to the Braida Carnevali counts, who recently bequeathed it to the FAI. The terraced garden is rich and diversified, which includes a rose garden, a long wisteria pergola and a vast lawn. But also flowerbeds of cut flowers produced in the villa’s greenhouses and a large avenue. Not to mention the terrace in front of the villa decorated with vases and flowered basins, commissioned by the last owner, Pupa Carnival Miniati, passionate about botany.
The Garden of the Impossible
The Garden of the Impossible on the island of Favignana was born in the sixties of the twentieth century around the family villa of Maria Gabriella Campo. It is now spread over four hectares of disused limestone quarries (white tuff), but despite this, it has become an enchanted garden in the rock, a riot of Mediterranean and exotic plants that bind several caves in a single path.
Passionate about botany, Ms. Campo has expanded the green endowment with collections of Hibiscus and plumerie, aquatic tanks and water lilies, fragrant pelargoniums, exotic trees of all kinds, or a botanical garden of over 500 different species.
The Library of Trees
There BAM-Library of Trees in Milan is a botanical garden created as part of the urban redevelopment in the Porta Nuova district. It was definitively returned to the Milanese population in October 2018, with the aim of giving the inhabitants a cultural experience in contact with nature.
The Library of the Trees of Milan (Bam), in the Porta Nuova area. The first floor, the pine grove adopted by iO Donna. Photo by Giovanni Hanninen.
Designed by the Dutch studio Inside Outside, it was built in part with the participated planting of the inhabitants and an important intervention by the landscape-nurseryman Piet Oudolf.
It has in the floristic list over 100 plant species, more than 500 trees which form 22 circular forests and 135,000 herbaceous and shrubby, climbing, aquatic, bulbous plants.
Managed in a public-private partnership, BAM is the third largest park in Milan and has the ambition to represent for Italy a new model of urban green and cultural enjoyment of nature.
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