In past centuries, the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice was famous for its marvelous gardens, celebrated by the poet Giulio Strozzi and described by foreign travellers, to the extent that at the beginning of the 19th century it was known as ‘the promenade island’.
The memory of that past has faded, but the garden still exists on the island and, albeit with many limitations, it is possible to discover its beauty.
ReadAt the end of the 18th century, a stroll in the gardens of the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore was one of the recommended promenades for travellers who went to Venice,1 to the extent that in the first decades of the 19th century this place was still known as ‘the promenade island’.2 Venetians used to stroll here especially on Sundays3 to seek – the historian Samuele Romanin wrote in the mid-19th century – ‘relief for their tired mind and free amusement in its lovely and spacious gardens’.4 ‘It seemed a magical enchantment – continued Romanin – to pass so quickly from the noisy city to the silence and stillness of the fields’.5
Already inhabited in Roman times, we know that a first church was founded on the island in 790 and that in the 9th century there were a vineyard and a small cypress forest, from which the island took its early name.6 A first church dedicated to St George was built in the 10th century and the creation of large vegetable gardens and pleasure gardens probably took place after the doge Tribuno Memmo donated the church to the Benedictines in 982 to be transformed into a convent, where he himself retired to monastic life.7
The construction of one of the two cloisters, the refectory and the current church dates back to the second half of the 16th century, works by Andrea Palladio, later completed by Vincenzo Scamozzi after the death of the Paduan architect.
The green areas of the island were also involved in the general renewal of this period, shortly before which they had been illustrated in the splendid Bird’s-Eye View of Venice that Jacopo de’ Barbari created in 1500. The View [see photos below] shows the presence of both types of pergola which were still widespread in Venice at that time, namely the flat-roofed and the barrel-vaulted tunnels, creating a geometric scheme typical of the medieval garden. In addition to the function of connecting separate areas of orchards and gardens, the pergolas at Island of San Giorgio also created a support for the vine and provided shelter from the summer sun. It is no coincidence that as many as four of the rare human figures present in de’ Barbari's View are depicted in the act of strolling in the gardens of the island.8 The View also highlights how the presence of those cypresses that had given the island its name was limited to a garden inside the monastic complex and how there were very few trees in the gardens at that time.
It was in the first decades of the 17th century that the poet Giulio Strozzi (1583-ca 1660) composed La Venetia Edificata (Venice, 1621; 1624), setting the garden of the sorceress Irene on the Island of San Giorgio.
The poem narrates how at the time of the foundation of Venice the sorceress – sent undercover by the King of the Huns, Attila, and therefore an enemy of Venice – had established her home on the island, transforming this place then abandoned and swampy in a wonderful garden. Here she had built a palace rich in marble among ‘double and green hyacinths’, ‘black roses’, ‘rich scented rushes’, ‘tall and pompous crowns’ (Imperial Crown, Fritillaria Imperialis), ‘Greek mosses', ‘three-tuft buttercups’, 'irises, and scabiosa’, as well as tulips, peonies and cyclamen.9 In the garden, behind the building, she had also had a mound erected, from the top of which the city and the sea could be seen10 and which curiously recalls the small hill where Luigi Vietti and Angelo Scattolin built the Green Theatre in 1951.
The plate [see photo below] that introduces the seventeenth canto – probably engraved by Francesco Valesio based on a design by Bernardo Castello – shows two large flowerbeds with a geometric design with a cypress at the centre, some trees, and a long vaulted pergola similar to the one depicted in de’ Barbari’s View.
Strozzi narrates how the island had become the setting of the love story between Irene and Riniero and the place where the sorceress had founded an academy of sages and organised banquets and dances. The poem ends with the killing of the sorceress by Riniero, who later abandons the island and, after being forgiven by the Senate of Venice, has a temple built there dedicated to St George, ‘author of Irene’s death’.11
The maps of Venice published from the second half of the 16th century to the end of the 17th century show how the presence of trees increased during and after the construction of the Palladian complex, arranged above all along the perimeter wall to the south and north-east, probably with a windbreak function. In the place where the cypresses were depicted in de’ Barbari's View stands the Cloister of the cypresses, designed by Palladio in 1579 and completed in 1646, after his death. From the same maps we deduce the survival of the geometric layout of the garden, with pergolas separating vegetable gardens and flower beds.
[left to right: Braun, Georg; Hogenberg, Frans, Venetia, 1572 (detail); Coronelli, Vincenzo Maria, Venezia, 1693 (detail); Coronelli, Vincenzo Maria, Singolarità di Venezia, ca 1709]
The American painter and art critic Eugene Benson visited the garden in the 1870s, about a decade before moving to Venice, where he died in 1908. At the time of his visit, half of the monastery was used by the Austrians soldiers as barracks and the memory of the executions of patriots that they carried out on the island after the insurrection of Venice in 1848 was still alive. When the painter entered the ‘famous garden’ he evoked the ‘days when the elegant Bembo, the gay cardinal-poet, attended by a court of choice men of the age, walked up and down the shaded groves of the richest of monasteries, and love-songs were written and sung in lieu of psalms to lovely women, and the festive spirit of a licentious existence reigned there’.12 Benson describes oleander bushes in bloom, beds of roses and carnations that scented the air, and a long avenue that the vine leaves made dark and cool. Walking along the avenue, he found tall lush green grasses on the sides, flowerless and with a strong smell, and he realised that the place was a snail farm. Benson left the garden thinking of the ‘ineffable love-moon of Venice shedding the delight of its tranquil beauty in that garden’.13
At the time of Benson's visit, i.e. during the occupation of the island by the Austrians, the forest or most of it no longer existed, probably torn down for military reasons. This can be deduced from a photograph of the island taken around 1880 by Paolo Salviati [photo below], a Venetian photographer famous for his panoramic views.In the 1950s, after the granting of most of the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore to the Cini Foundation in 1951, the garden was restructured with the creation of flowerbeds and a network of paths leading to the Green Theatre (currently under restoration). The avenues were flanked by tall trees and hedges were planted on the sides of secondary paths, as can be seen in the photo below taken by Luigi Bortoluzzi (aka Borlui) not later than 1962.
Free access to the gardens was prohibited and, after years of total closure, recently allowed only to the Vatican Chapels through paid guided tours.
According to information provided by the Cini Foundation, the garden has 1,083 tree plants belonging to over 50 species, among which holm oak, cypress and Aleppo pine prevail, while less common is plane tree, Arizona cypress, European hackberry and stone pine.
Unless otherwise specified, all photos are © Museo del Camminare
1. Reichard, Hans Ottokar, Guide des voyageurs en Europe, Weimar, Bureau d’Industrie, 1793, p. 317.
2. Pagnozzi, G. R., Geografia moderna universale, vol. IX, Firenze, Vincenzo Batelli, 1824, p. 574.
3. Reichard, Hans Ottokar, Guide des voyageurs en Europe, Weimar, Bureau d’Industrie, 1818, p. 90.
4. Romanin, Samuele, Storia documentata di Venezia, vol. IX, Venezia, P. Naratovich, 1860, p. 28.
5. Ibid.
6. Molmenti, Pompeo; Mantovani, Dino, Le isole della laguna veneta, Bergamo, Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1910, p. 29.
7. Ivi, p. 30.
8. Nonaka, Natsumi, Renaissance Porticoes and Painted Pergolas, London; New York, Routledge, 2017, p. 30.
9. Strozzi, Giulio, La Venetia edificata, Venezia, Pinelli, 1624, p. 116.
10. Ibid.
11. Ivi, p. 199.
12. Benson, Eugene, ‘San Giorgio Maggiore’, Appletons’ Journal, V, July-Dec 1878, pp. 428-30, p. 430.
13. Ibid.
© Museo del Camminare 2023, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
