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The gardens of Venice
text Laura Hierche
The first look on Venice astonishes us by the multitude of channels, streets and palaces that themselves here crisscross. But the green spaces that we can see are rare. As in so many other things, Venice is as a coquettish young girl who hides to the sight of her unknown admirers every her beauties.
Rarely it allows us to discover one of its more poetic aspects: its secret gardens. They are part of its intimacy. They nest behind the facades of the palaces, behind the walls of the homes of where emergent only the summits of their trees, jealously hidden to the indiscreet looks. Just a fine connoisseur of Venice knows how to spy on them through a gate that gives on the water or on a street. Only who likes to observe every detail, to lift the eyes toward the sky and to see a tree that betrays their presence, or to observe to the right and left in the places in appearance more meaningless success in discovering them. An other solution is to climb of a bell tower to try to make competition to the birds, unique inhabitants of this city who know each its secluded angles. Some rare overlook the Gran Canal protected by candid balusters of stone of Istria, perhaps the only ones where vanity has had the upper hand, for the joy of our eyes...
(photo: Laura Hierche)
The tradition of the gardens of Venice and its lagoon even goes up again to its same creation, surely for necessity in origin. Venice had to absolutely be independent and self-sufficient in case of wars, without needing the mainland. Its first gardens were therefore kitchen gardens with their angle in bloom. In fact the Venetian garden doesn't include divisions among decorative garden and the orchard or vegetable garden, there is an absolute continuation between them. Today the kitchen gardens only survived in the convents and the island of Sant'Erasmo with its market gardens that nourishes always the market of Rialto and the merchants of fruits and greeneries of the city.
In even way, Venice having always been deeply fascinated from Bisanzio and from the Orient, numerous are the Byzantine gardens with their central well, their pergola under which to rest to the shade and their tiny measures that make them resemble to small caskets framed by the sumptuous architecture of the palaces that contain them.
If they are not real gardens, they are gardens suspended on terraces or on "altane" that dominate the roofs hung on wood armatures. Like a second living room under the stars, caressed by the breeze, they are the ideal places to take the evening cool during the months of big heat.
With time, the total autonomy from the mainland was not more necessary . Rather Venice widened its possessions over the lagoon, and, being often in contact with the foreign courts and particularly with France, it develops more always a passion for the purely ornamental garden. Few to few the Venetian gardens alternated themselves to French gardens, to exotic gardens or to English gardens.
With the fall of the Serenissima and the arrival of Napoleon, the public gardens appeared, as the gardens of Castle, today centre of the Biennale exhibition. With then the arrival of the Austrians that they stormed the population of taxes and they put the riches families in knee, numerous were the gardens created on palaces destroyed for not to pay further taxes on the ownership.
Recently, new gardens were created by the great names of the architecture as the garden of the Library Querini Stampalia on the design of Carlo Scarpa.
The green spaces of Venice were not never therefore neglected and are still fondly and jealously preserved by the Venetians. It is also some times possible to visit some of them for kind concession of the owners who unveil their marvels to kids groups, but only under the guardianship of their custodians par excellence who love, draw and restore them. (for more informations...)