Orto Botanico Lorenzo Rota

Beneath the Venetian Walls at Colle Aperto, Bergamo tends a small municipal botanical garden founded in 1972 and named for the 19th-century botanist who first described the province's flora. The Lorenzo Rota garden contains alpine and rock-garden plants, ferns, orchids and a living hortus arranged in hillside terraces.

Why it matters

The city created the garden on the initiative of local naturalists; it is both a conservation site, protecting the flora of the Bergamasco mountains and pre-Alps, and a teaching garden recognised by the Lombardy Region and connected to botanic garden networks. Its second site at Astino, opened in 2015, extends the mission into cultivated biodiversity with more than a thousand vegetable varieties.

What to notice

The historic garden at Colle Aperto is arranged as micro-habitats stepping down the slope: rock gardens for the flora of cliffs and scree, mountain species that would not survive the plain, ferns in shaded corners, and aquatic settings. Collections of medicinal and useful plants connect the garden to rural traditions of the province. The garden also keeps the herbarium of Lorenzo Rota (1818–1853), the botanist remembered as the first describer of the province's flora, together with botanical models and the "Hortus Pictus Bergomensis", a collection of painted plants. Interpretive labels relate the cultivated displays to plants found in the hills around the city.

Context and history

The garden was established in 1972 as a municipal institution, driven by the city's naturalist circles and its then chief engineer, an amateur lichenologist whose interests shaped the garden's early scientific direction. It was named for Lorenzo Rota, the 19th-century Bergamasco botanist whose herbarium documents the province's wild flora. Over the decades the garden gained recognition from the Lombardy Region as a museum, joined the Rete degli Orti Botanici della Lombardia in 2002, and became a member of national and international botanic garden societies. In 2015 it added the Valle della Biodiversità at Astino, in the valley behind the hill, conserving over a thousand varieties of cultivated food plants — a modern extension of the conservation mission to agricultural biodiversity.