The Monumental Planes of the Montagnola

Bologna's first public park started as a rubbish tip. The raised ground of the Montagnola had been used since medieval times to dump debris, and only became public space in 1662, planted first with orchards and mulberries before Napoleon, passing through the city in 1805, ordered it redesigned along French garden principles by the architect Giovanni Battista Martinetti. The plane trees that give the park its shaded, formal character today date from that redesign, and roughly ten of them, out of some fifty planted across the park's six hectares, still count as genuinely monumental: trunks running one to one and a half metres across, several confirmed to exceed four metres in circumference. A dramatic 1896 entrance staircase from Via Indipendenza, nicknamed the Pincio of Bologna after Rome's own hillside park, was added decades later, but the trees along the park's two concentric paths are the oldest surviving element of Martinetti's original scheme, healthy and still growing more than two centuries after Napoleonic administrators decided a rubbish heap deserved better.