Discover Giardino Giusti

The Giusti garden lies behind a palace on the left bank of the Adige, a few minutes from the Roman theatre, and it is one of the finest surviving Italian Renaissance gardens.

It was laid out from the 1570s and has the classic structure: a formal lower garden of box parterres on the flat, an avenue of cypresses running straight up the axis, and then a wooded hillside climbing to a belvedere over Verona.

Halfway up, a grotesque stone mask stares down the avenue. It once breathed fire, which tells you most of what you need to know about what this garden was for.

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.

Everything hangs on one axis. From the palace courtyard the design runs dead straight: through the formal garden, up the cypress avenue, to the mask, and on to the belvedere. Stand at the bottom and the whole composition is visible at once, which is the effect it was built for.

Two halves, deliberately opposed. The lower garden is flat and geometric — box compartments, gravel walks, statues, fountains, lemon pots in their movable terracotta. The upper is rock, wood and winding path. Renaissance garden theory set arte against natura on purpose, and the ground here made the contrast easy: flat river terrace below, cliff behind.

The mask is a hinge, not an ornament. The grotesque carved face set into the rock marks exactly where the ordered garden stops and the wild one begins. It once breathed smoke for visitors.

The cypresses are structural. They are not planting so much as architecture — a colonnade in vegetation, holding the axis up the slope. Goethe admired one of them in 1786.

Is it a long climb? The upper garden is a real hillside: stepped, uneven and steep in places. The lower formal garden is flat and can be enjoyed on its own if the climb is not for you.

Is the maze original? In its lines, yes. A labyrinth was part of the garden from its sixteenth-century layout; what you walk today is Luigi Trezza’s 1786 redesign of it, which simplified the original rather than inventing one. That is why it counts among the older surviving garden mazes in Europe.

Why is admission higher than the churches? It is privately owned and privately maintained, which is also why it still has its original plan. The Verona Card includes it.