The Founding Trees of the Giardini della Biennale

Venice's biggest green space exists because Napoleon needed somewhere to put a park and had no scruples about what stood in the way. In 1807 his decree ordered the city to create public gardens, and to make room, engineers demolished a cluster of churches and convents on marshy ground at the eastern edge of Castello, including San Domenico and Sant'Antonio Abate, and drained the site. Architect Giannantonio Selva, working with botanist Pietro Antonio Zorzi, laid out a formal neoclassical garden of straight avenues, inaugurated in 1810. By the mid-19th century, fashion had shifted, and the geometry was reworked into the winding paths and irregular groves visible today. More than a hundred tree species now grow across the site, lindens, hackberries and plane trees among the most common, though no individual specimen here has ever been separately dated or measured. Since 1895 two thirds of the grounds have hosted the Venice Biennale's international pavilions, making this simultaneously the city's oldest public garden and its best known contemporary art venue, with cats that have their own informal reputation among regulars.