Palazzo Giardino

Known to its own century as "Il Casino", this low, white-washed building beside the Galleria degli Antichi was Duke Vespasiano Gonzaga’s private retreat. Behind the plain facade are mythological vaults and the remains of a Renaissance garden.

Why it matters

Palazzo Giardino served as a suburban villa in the quarter reserved for the prince. Arcades once connected the two-storey building to the now-lost castle and to the Galleria degli Antichi, which closes the same square. Construction followed Vespasiano's definitive return from Spain in 1578–79 and was complete by 1588, with the decorative campaign assigned in 1582 to Bernardino Campi, the Cremonese painter.

The rooms form an iconographic programme of classical and biblical themes.

What to notice

The white stucco facade is enlivened by an oak cornice carved with lion-head brackets and geometric faux-marble frescoes near the roofline. Inside, the rooms are covered with stucco and painting.

On the ground floor, the Camerino di Venere shows Venus driving her chariot of doves across a vault of grotesques; the Sala dei Venti depicts a stormy sky crowded with six named ancient winds — Africus, Aquilo, Circius, Corus, Favonius, Subsolanus — blowing cheek-puffed among the clouds; the Sala di Marte pairs biblical scenes with medallions of Alexander and Julius Caesar, accompanied by Latin verses celebrating conquest and imperial power. The piano nobile continues with the Sala dei Cesari, its painted peristilio of fake statues, the Sala dei Miti, the duke's own studiolo dedicated to Aeneas, the Sala degli Specchi and the Camerino delle Grazie.

The garden wing, created from 1584 on a design attributed to Campi, had a trapezoidal parterre ringed by walls with three arched grottoes, paved in river pebbles and decorated with natural stalactites, shell-shaped marble basins and lion-head spouts. A domed wooden fountain structure stood at the crossing of the paths, surrounded by pergolas of vines, ancient statues and tubs of oranges and lemons. Archaeological excavation has uncovered the lead pipework that once drove its water games.

Context and history

The palace reflects the literary interests of Vespasiano’s later building campaigns. His biographers describe a soldier and humanist who spent decades in imperial service, and the Casino was where classical myth expressed those interests: Ovidian metamorphosis in the Sala dei Circhi with the story of Baucis and Philemon, Orpheus along the corridor, the winds and gods overhead. The historical inventories gave the Sala dei Sogni — the room of dreams — its name; the bust said to be of Virgil that stood there has since moved to Mantua.

The garden retained its sixteenth-century form only into the early seventeenth century, then decayed; two of the shell basins were moved in the nineteenth century to the parish church, where they ended up as holy-water stoups.