Parco Ranghiasci

On the slopes of Monte Ingino above Gubbio's cathedral, Ranghiasci Park preserves a nineteenth-century English-style landscape garden. Its five tree-lined carriage ramps, classical tempietto, and tower kept as a ruin frame views across the medieval city.

Why it matters

The Parco Ranghiasci is a green counterpoint to Gubbio's stone architecture. The Comune di Gubbio records that before the park's creation, the town had small vegetable plots behind patrician palaces rather than gardens in the modern sense. Marchese Francesco Ranghiasci created a garden in the English manner, among the early romantic landscape gardens of Umbria. The park also preserves mature plantings: the horse-chestnut ramp has forty-three trees with trunks around two metres in girth, estimated at roughly a century and a half old. Towers, San Domenico and Palazzo dei Consoli appear between the foliage.

What to notice

The five carriage ramps climb the slope in hairpin turns, with different plantings along their routes: lindens on the Rampa dei Tigli, horse chestnuts on the Rampa degli Ippocastani, and holm oaks on the Rampa dei Lecci. The Tempietto has Corinthian columns, the Ranghiasci-Brancaleoni arms and the motto Virtus omnia vincit. A neoclassical Villino, a former stable block bearing the Benveduti arms, a covered bridge across the Camignano stream, a brick fountain and tufa seats punctuate the grounds. At the top, the medieval tower of San Luca was retained as a ruin. Its two pointed arches frame a classical mask, and a six-metre cistern was once fed from the Bottaccione conduit. The Bosco Sacro recalls the monastic grove of the suppressed church of San Luca.

Context and history

Francesco Ranghiasci, a Gubbio nobleman of Genoese banking family, married Matilde Hobhouse in Rome in 1827; the Comune associates her English landscape sensibility with the garden. Land purchases began in 1831 and continued through 1848, including the Rosetti property and former monastery of San Luca in 1835. In 1841 Francesco demolished the church, retaining its tower as a ruin. The Comune dates the garden's active life from 1831 to 1849 and says the design was fully realised in 1857, when Via della Ripa was rerouted and the bridge over the Camignano completed. After Francesco's death in 1877, the garden declined; it later served as a summer colony and hosted a 1951 ball for the Premio Giornalistico Gubbio. Subsequent restoration returned it to public use.