Historic parks and monumental gardens

Spazio Verde participates in the maintenance, conservation, restoration and recovery of historic parks and monumental gardens.

According to the Charter of Historic Gardens drawn up by the ICOMOS-IFLA Historic Gardens Committee in Florence in 1981, a historic garden is “an architectural and plant composition which, from a historical or artistic point of view, is of public interest. As such, it is considered a monument”.

As a monument whose main component is vegetation, which is alive, changeable and indefinitely renewable, and as a place of memory, a historic garden demands special rules covering its maintenance, conservation, restoration and recovery. Such rules have to take into account the cultural and historical value the garden expresses, the landscape context in which it was designed and the transformations it has undergone over the centuries.

The fundamental question facing Spazio Verde’s green tailors in such cases is: how to reconcile the past with the contemporary? Their intervention projects are thus aimed at safeguarding the identity of sites that reflect a bygone era and a certain image of nature, while continuing their history and adapting them to contemporary transformations and challenges. Such projects are often made more difficult by the fact that only a few traces may remain of the garden in question. We can find ourselves torn between two desires, that of recreating what time has erased and, on the contrary, of reviving the spirit of a site with a contemporary interpretation that combines today’s aesthetics with the imagination of those that conceived the garden in the first place.