Royal Gardens of Venice Historical Timeline

Origins

The Giardini Reali were laid out in 1806, after Napoleon and his viceroy, Eugene de Beauharnais, converted the nearby Procuratie Nuove into a royal palace and commissioned a garden to accompany it. Architect Giovanni Antonio Antolini designed the new grounds on the site of the Granai di Terranova, a Gothic grain warehouse built in 1340 that had stood there for more than four centuries.

Turning points

After Napoleon's fall, Venice passed to Austrian rule, and the gardens were enlarged between 1815 and 1817. A new greenhouse rose beside the Zecca bridge, and on the opposite side, architect Lorenzo Santi designed an elegant neoclassical coffee pavilion. A drawbridge over the Rio della Zecca linked the gardens directly to the Procuratie -- a physical and visual connection to Piazza San Marco that survives today.

For decades the gardens remained a private preserve of the court rather than a public park. That began to change in 1857, when Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian -- later, briefly, Emperor of Mexico -- opened the adjoining waterfront promenade to the public, even as the gardens themselves stayed closed. Full public access finally came on December 23, 1920, when the gardens passed to the Municipality of Venice and opened to everyone.

Influential people

Beyond Napoleon and the Austrian archdukes who shaped its early history, the garden's most devoted 19th-century visitor may have been Empress Elisabeth of Austria -- known as Sissi -- who, during her long stays in Venice between 1857 and 1862, was said to enjoy walking its avenues alone and taking coffee in the greenhouse. Its most recent chapter belongs to landscape architect Paolo Pejrone, who led the botanical restoration completed in 2020, and architect Alberto Torsello, who oversaw the rebuilding of the greenhouse and coffee pavilion.

Cultural evolution

Like much of Venice's public infrastructure, the gardens slowly deteriorated over the 20th century as maintenance funding dried up. By the early 2000s, the greenhouse and coffee pavilion had fallen into disrepair, and the gardens' original 19th-century layout was barely legible beneath overgrown planting.

Present-day significance

In December 2014, the State Property Office and the City of Venice granted a 19-year concession to the Venice Gardens Foundation to restore and manage the site, with funding led by the insurance group Generali. The gardens reopened to the public in December 2019, following restoration work costing just over six million euros. The historic coffee pavilion now operates again as a café, giving visitors a rare quiet spot to sit down within sight of the Bacino di San Marco.