Villa Vecchia

The story

Villa Vecchia began as the enclosed garden of a convent, Santa Maria di Costantinopoli. Sources disagree on when: some speak of a garden dating from the 1600s, while a study of archive documents notes that the convent was founded in 1711. By 1815 there was already a lease with the municipality for the "Giardino Comunale di Costantinopoli", and the city became its owner in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Its life as a public park is nineteenth-century. Mayor Davide Andreotti (1863-64) is remembered for giving the city a municipal villa, today's Villa Vecchia. Its main axis, Viale Guicciardi, dates from 1870; in 1878 the council approved one of the first restyling works, and in 1932 the monumental entrance on Via Petrarca was built. The park covers about 30,000 square metres, laid out in terraces up to the slopes of Colle Guarassano.

What to look for

In the lower part of the park look for the basin with the statue of Venus and, further on, the Fountain of the Thirteen Channels. Among the trees, note the old holm oaks, whose branches interlace into a green tunnel.