Parco Ferruccio Parri (Giardino delle sculture)

Cuneo's former piazza d'Armi was a military parade ground for most of a century. It is now an eight-hectare park named for partisan leader Ferruccio Parri, with lakes, meadows, an urban wood, contemporary sculptures and murals on former barracks walls.

Why it matters

The transformation of the piazza d'Armi reshaped Cuneo's public space. The former drill ground was named for Ferruccio Parri, the Piedmontese partisan commander known in the Resistance as "Maurizio", who headed Italy's first post-war government of national unity in 1945. Reclamation began in 2014, with major works underway by 2020 under the "Periferie al centro" programme; the park opened in May 2022. Contemporary sculpture and murals on the former caserma Montezemolo, supported by the Fondazione CRC, form part of the site's cultural landscape.

What to notice

A canal-like channel crosses the park and feeds a naturalistic lake; rain gardens filter runoff. More than five hundred trees, including native species and an orchard, form an urban wood. Contemporary sculptures are set among the greenery. Murals on the former Montezemolo barracks turn the military wall into a canvas, a regeneration project supported by the Fondazione CRC. The level former parade ground preserves open sightlines toward the mountains around the Cuneo plain.

Context and history

The piazza d'Armi belonged to the military belt that long surrounded Cuneo, a fortress town whose garrison presence survived into the late twentieth century. When the drills ended, the ground lay fallow as an undefined lawn at the edge of the centre. The city dedicated it to Ferruccio Parri in 2012, tying the place to the partisan memory also honoured elsewhere in town, and committed to its conversion as part of its sustainable development strategy referencing the 2030 Agenda. The design was selected through an open call and developed by a team led by Roman architect Antonello Piccirillo with 1AX Architetti Associati, BIOS-IS and the Magliano e Morra studio. Works were in progress by 2020; the project was presented internationally at the ECOtechGREEN forum on 2 December 2020 and the park was inaugurated on 28 May 2022. Around it, the decommissioned Montezemolo barracks became a canvas for murals, an artistic recovery of the military perimeter promoted with the Fondazione CRC, so that park and barracks now read together as one regenerated district.