Why you should experience Giardino della Villa Belgiojoso Bonaparte in Milan, Italy.
Giardino della Villa Belgiojoso Bonaparte is a secluded landscape garden where Porta Venezia's Habsburg aristocracy, early English garden design, Neoclassical culture and Napoleonic court life converge behind one of Milan's great eighteenth-century residences.
Set along Via Palestro near Via Marina and just steps from Giardini Indro Montanelli, the garden occupies the private counterpart to Milan's first great era of designed urban greenery, when the late eighteenth century brought Giuseppe Piermarini's public gardens to the former monastic grounds nearby and Leopoldo Pollack's radically different landscape for Count Ludovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso behind the new villa. Curving paths disappear between mature trees before reappearing beside a stream, bridges, grottoes and an irregular pond whose island carries a circular temple dedicated to Love. Artificial ruins deepen the illusion of an inherited landscape as architecture appears intermittently through vegetation. The result is a garden where an aristocratic experiment in landscape design still separates itself from surrounding Milan through concealment, changing viewpoints and a sequence conceived to make nineteen thousand square meters feel far larger than their physical boundaries.
What you should know about Giardino della Villa Belgiojoso Bonaparte.
Giardino della Villa Belgiojoso Bonaparte is best known for becoming one of Milan's earliest English-style gardens when Ludovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso commissioned Leopoldo Pollack to create the landscape alongside the villa during the 1790s. Belgiojoso had returned to Milan after an extensive career serving the Habsburg court and conceived the property as the residence for his retirement from military and diplomatic life. Pollack worked with Count Ercole Silva, a leading Italian authority on landscape gardening who subsequently published Dell'arte dei giardini inglesi in 1801. Their composition rejected rigid axial geometry for an asymmetrical sequence governed by curves, changes in elevation, vegetation and water, an approach still unusual in Milan when the garden was realized in 1793. A small waterfall descends through rocks into a stream crossing the grounds before reaching the shaded pond, where Silva's circular Tempietto d'Amore occupies an island. Literary associations entered the landscape through constructed ruins including the Sarcophagus of Laura, Tower of Count Ugolino and Temple of the Fates, giving the garden episodes drawn from poetry and imagined antiquity. Pollack and Silva consequently created more than ornamental grounds for Belgiojoso: water, architecture, literary memory and controlled irregularity became a sequence through which Milan encountered a new conception of the designed landscape.
Political upheaval changed the meaning of that private world. French forces entered Milan in 1796, and Napoleon and Joséphine stayed at the property before the Italian Republic acquired the villa in 1802 following Belgiojoso's death. The residence subsequently entered Napoleon's orbit and became the permanent Milanese home of Viceroy Eugène de Beauharnais and his wife Augusta of Bavaria, placing the garden behind one of the principal court residences of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Italy. Austrian rule returned the complex to Habsburg control, and Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky later lived there and died in the villa in 1858. Milan eventually acquired the property, and the villa became the home of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in 1921, converting a residence shaped by aristocrats, Napoleon's government and Austrian commanders into a civic cultural institution. Twentieth-century sculpture subsequently entered the landscape through Adolf Wildt's 1912 Il Santo, il Giovane, la Saggezza and Fausto Melotti's I sette savi of 1981 near the point where the garden meets the PAC. The grounds were restored during the 1990s and retain an unusual modern restriction reserving entry for children and adults accompanying them, giving a former aristocratic retreat an unexpected civic afterlife centered on childhood.
How to fold Giardino della Villa Belgiojoso Bonaparte into your trip.
Giardino della Villa Belgiojoso Bonaparte works as the anchor for a daytime progression through Milan's first public garden, a twentieth-century private villa built for an industrial family and a postwar exhibition pavilion whose destruction and reconstruction became part of the city's cultural history.
Begin at Giardini Indro Montanelli, where Habsburg suppression of the monasteries of San Dionigi and the Carcanine released ground for Giuseppe Piermarini to create Milan's first public garden between 1782 and 1786. His French-style geometry and tree-lined perspectives were transformed by Giuseppe Balzaretto in the nineteenth century through picturesque rocks, streams, ponds and the incorporation of Palazzo Dugnani, before Emilio Alemagna altered the grounds again following the exhibitions of 1871 and 1881. Continue to Villa Necchi Campiglio, where Piero Portaluppi designed an independent urban residence between 1932 and 1935 for sisters Nedda and Gigina Necchi and Gigina's husband Angelo Campiglio, members of Milan's industrial bourgeoisie. Portaluppi combined asymmetrical elevations with an unusually complete domestic composition, and Tomaso Buzzi subsequently reshaped parts of the interior before the property entered FAI ownership through the Necchi sisters and became a house museum enriched by the de' Micheli, Claudia Gian Ferrari and Guido Sforni collections. Conclude at PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, where Ignazio Gardella and Costantino Baroni developed a new exhibition building from 1947 on the site of Villa Reale's stables, which had been devastated during the 1943 bombing of Milan. Completed in 1954, its trapezoidal three-level composition opened sculpture spaces directly toward the Belgiojoso garden through expansive glazing. A car bomb devastated the pavilion on July 27, 1993, and Ignazio Gardella returned with his son Jacopo to reconstruct it, leading to its reopening in July 1996. The progression moves from Piermarini creating public green space under Habsburg reform through Portaluppi translating Milanese industrial wealth into a private modern residence into Gardella building and then resurrecting a cultural institution beside Belgiojoso's eighteenth-century landscape, compressing two centuries of Milanese architecture around Giardino della Villa Belgiojoso Bonaparte.
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