Giardino Giusti

Behind a plain street frontage on the Adige's left bank, the Giusti Garden opens into sixteenth-century grandeur: a cypress avenue, a mask-faced grotto, a hedge labyrinth and a belvedere over Verona's rooftops. Mozart walked here in 1769; Goethe mourned its famous cypress. The same family still keeps it.

Why it matters

The Giusti Garden stands among the major examples of the Italian garden and remains cared for by the family that created it. Its fame is old and documented: the Giusti rose from Tuscan wool-dyers to a noble house, and their garden became a stop for Grand Tour travellers. The operator lists Mozart in 1769, Cosimo III de' Medici and Tsar Alexander I among its historic visitors. Clipped parterres, mythological statues, fountains and grottoes rise across three levels from the flat garden to a hilltop terrace overlooking Verona.

What to notice

A cypress avenue climbs from the parterre to a grotto and the great mascherone, a mask-faced belvedere attributed to Bartolomeo Ridolfi and designed to spout fire and smoke. A spiral staircase in a tower leads toward the upper garden beside fourteenth-century Scaliger walls. The flat garden's parterre, laid out in the French manner in 1765, holds five statues by the Muttoni — Diana, Venus, Atalanta, Apollo and Adonis — while the so-called sacred wood contains laurels and yews. The grotto retains its sixteenth-century architectural facade and a vault crusted with shells, corals, mother-of-pearl and sponges; a grotto-chapel of 1591 stands nearby. The labyrinth on the upper slope was redrawn by architect Luigi Trezza in 1786. The cypress admired by Goethe in 1786 and described in his Italian Journey was felled by a storm on 23 August 2020; the operator reports that it was more than six hundred years old.

Context and history

The family arrived from Tuscany in the late thirteenth century to work in Verona's wool-dyeing industry; in 1406 Provolo Giusti bought land beside the ancient Via Postumia for dye vats and cloth-drying yards. In the sixteenth century the industrial holding was transformed into a representation palace in the style of Sanmicheli with a formal garden of box, cypresses, fountains and grottoes. The principal author was Agostino Giusti (1548-1615), a cultivated man devoted to music and painting, in contact with the Medici and the Habsburgs and trusted by Venice; an avid collector of antiquities, he gathered Roman inscriptions and fragments into the garden, and in 1581 his courtyard staged the premiere of Torquato Tasso's Aminta. Walls of the twelfth century, which the operator traces back to the Theodoric era, enclose the upper level, their niches once holding pagan statues; the swallow-tailed merlons over the courtyard honour the family's Ghibelline origins. The garden is still under continuous restoration and, in the operator's words, kept all'antica — maintained in the ancient manner, favouring architecture, myth and evergreen structure over flowers.