Giardino Giusti Site Features

The design is built on a single strong axis: from the palace courtyard, straight through the formal garden, up the cypress avenue, to the mask and the belvedere above.

The lower garden is flat and geometric -- box hedges clipped into compartments, gravel walks, statues, fountains and lemon pots -- the controlled half of the Renaissance idea.

The upper garden is the opposite: a steep, rocky, wooded hillside with winding paths, grottoes and terraces. Renaissance gardens were meant to stage this contrast between art and nature, and few surviving examples do it as clearly, because few had a cliff to work with.

The mascherone -- a large grotesque face carved into the rock at the top of the avenue -- was fitted to emit smoke and flame for the entertainment of guests.

The belvedere tower at the summit gives the view over the garden, the river and the whole city.

The cypress avenue

Running dead straight up the axis. Goethe singled the cypresses out in 1786; the 2020 storm took several of the oldest, and their replacements are now growing in.

The mascherone

A grotesque stone face at the head of the avenue, once rigged to breathe fire at visitors.

The belvedere

The climb to the top is steep and the view over Verona from it is among the best in the city.

The maze

Redesigned in 1786 by Luigi Trezza, and one of Europe's older surviving garden mazes -- small, box-hedged and genuinely confusing.

The grottoes and terraces

Cut into the hillside on the way up, part of the garden's deliberate shift from order into wildness.

The garden occupies the foot and flank of the hills on the left bank of the Adige, the same ridge that carries Castel San Pietro further west.

Its whole design depends on that gradient: a flat terrace at the bottom against a steep rocky slope behind, which is what allowed the formal-to-wild progression the Renaissance wanted.

The hillside is limestone, planted with cypress, holm oak and Mediterranean shrubs, and it is noticeably hotter and drier than the enclosed garden below.

From the belvedere the view takes in the garden's own axis, the river, the old city across it and the hills beyond.