Giardino Salvi
You begin in a small garden: among Vicenza's public green spaces, Giardino Salvi is one of the least extensive, tucked against the old walls of Piazza Castello. Look for the statues and the two loggias in Palladian style. On the Loggia Valmarana you can read the date 1592 and the name of Leonardo Valmarana, the man who opened the garden that year.
The story starts in the sixteenth century, when the Valmarana family bought the land and also took over the old Scaliger castle next door, which they turned into a palace. Giacomo Valmarana laid the garden out as a formal Italian parterre, the way the eighteenth-century Vicenza engraver Cristoforo Dall'Acqua later showed it. Along one side ran the Roggia Seriola, a water ditch crossed from the very beginning by a small wooden footbridge.
Leonardo wanted the garden open to everyone, yet it was then closed for a couple of centuries. In the nineteenth century it was reshaped as an English landscape garden and belonged to the Salvi family. The last of them, Count Girolamo, left it to the charitable foundation he had created, and on 25 May 1907 the city bought its 12,000 square metres for 90,000 lire. The public came back in on 1 June 1909.
Two later layers are still part of the picture: the pavilions of the former trade fair, built in 1947 between the ditch and the walls where Leonardo had put up greenhouses in 1583, and the collection rose garden added in the restoration completed in February 2009. Since the 2000s the garden often hosts Christmas markets. Entry is free, so linger as long as you like, then walk 680 m, about 9 minutes, to Palazzo Barbaran da Porto.




















