Venice Gardens Foundation: objectives and projects

Venice Gardens Foundation was founded in 2014 with the objective of restoring and conserving parks, gardens, and sites of historical and cultural interest. The Foundation promotes, develops and carries out projects which are aimed at protecting the city’s botanical and cultural heritage and at bringing recognition to the fundamental role played by these sites, within the com- munity and wider society, in fostering a harmonious accord between spirit and nature.

All the sites restored by the Foundation are subsequently cared for and conserved by the Foundation’s own gardeners, by means of specific programmes that are a synthesis of traditional knowledge and new techniques. As a member of The Association of International Private Committees for the Safeguarding of Venice, and listed in the National Research Register of the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, the Venice Gardens Foundation is also committed to the development and application of studies into innovation and the sustainable and responsible management of landscape heritage, together with relative training courses.

Action and thought in the service of harmony among beings, expressed in words that are well-chosen, precise, symbolic and evocative, in a movement towards a more natural form of comprehension in which researchers, writers and artists can sow seeds, sounds and visions, creating works closely connected to the essence and the life of the gardens.

It was upon these same values that Venice Gardens Foundation promoted and carried out the restoration of the Royal Gardens in the city of Venice between 2014 and 2019. While on the one hand the task drew upon the urban and architectural principles and themes which had breathed life into the original nineteenth-century project, on the other, it recalibrated the delicate equilibrium existing between the various citizen groups that compose the city context. Today, the Gardens are at once thriving, flourishing and exuberant, yet they are also restrained. The plants, originating from various parts of the world, bear important botanical witness to the principle of accommodation and welcome which is so much a part of the Venetian spirit.

Adele Re Rebaudengo
President, Venice Gardens Foundation