Ferrara, new Renaissance garden at Palazzo Schifanoia opens

The new garden at Palazzo Schifanoia opens in Ferrara , a Renaissance-style garden that can now finally be walked through by the public. The site consists of pergolas, hedges, climbing roses, espalier-bred ancient fruit trees, and walks among natural essences. The intervention is carried out with an investment of 140 thousand euros supported by the Ferrara municipal administration, including about 40 thousand euros of technical sponsorship from Copma cooperative, for its 50th anniversary.

The succession of pergola, hedge, espalier fruit trees is intended to create an effect similar to that of theater wings, expanding to the view spaces that, in size, are about one-fifth of the original Renaissance garden. Schifanoia’s ancient green space, in fact, was part of the garden tradition established in Italian Renaissance courts, which favored large grassy areas traversed by paths that divided the space into four portions of identical square footage. Of the ancient garden, both the shapes that drew it and its initial dimensions, which, according to reconstructions, must have been five times larger, have been lost. Comparison with Filippo Borgatti’s map made in 1597 and the current state revealed signs that the restoration project treasured.

Rossella Bizzi, of the Municipality of Ferrara, is in charge of the architectural design and construction management; engineer Paolo Rebecchi, of the Municipality, is in charge of the process; by Manfredi Patitucci, a Ferrara landscape architect trained at Birkbeck University in London, is the landscape consultant and art director. To Copma, Councillor Andrea Maggi renews the Administration’s thanks: “This is an important example of the virtuous collaboration between public and private, oriented to the protection and recovery of a historical asset of extraordinary value,” also announcing, “In the pipeline there is already a next intervention, with intercepted Pnrr funds, for the enhancement of accessibility and further enhancement of the place.”

“We are waiting for the times of nature, which will allow,” Patitucci explains, "the roses to fully cover the arches of the pergola, which traces the measure of the central path of the garden as documented by Filippo Borgatti’s 1597 plan of Ferrara. Those that are emerging, some of which are already fully visible, are all English roses, vigorous (hardy), fragrant and re-blooming (they bloom until October-November), from a nursery in Assisi.

Fruit trees have also been planted, espaliered, along the 66-meter perimeter wall that surrounds the building and five other isolated trees, on axis with the pergola, which give the effect of visual continuity and are grafted into the existing context of oak, magnolia, flowering cherry and wild cherry trees, as well as birch, liquidambar and hazel shrubs that have grown over the decades. The new ’orchard’ consists of pear, apple and plum trees of old species. Some linear hedge elements also trace the 16th-century garden’s sedge, as it emerges from ancient drawings, ideally the Renaissance path."

Ferrara, new Renaissance garden at Palazzo Schifanoia opens

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