April is the month when Italy stops promising and begins to deliver. The days lengthen, the air warms but not yet oppressively, and in the historic gardens of the North something extraordinary happens every year with almost moving punctuality: nature comes back to life, and it does so in grand fashion. There’s no need to fly to Kyoto to see cherry blossoms or to cross the Netherlands to find fields of tulips. You only need to know where to look.
The northern portion of our country hides, within the folds of its territory, a network of parks and botanical gardens that in spring reach their peak expression. Some host record-breaking blooms, others guard rare species or centennial stories. All offer everything of beauty one can enjoy in this season: intense fragrances, vivid colors, and a nature that bursts with strength, to be discovered step by step.
Sigurtà Garden Park
The Sigurtà Garden Park covers 60 hectares of meadows, tree-lined avenues and lakes at Valeggio sul Mincio, in the province of Verona. In April it becomes the stage for perhaps the most astonishing botanical show in Italy, the country’s largest tulip bloom: every year more than a million bulbs are planted, and at blooming time they unleash an explosion of colors among the borders, lawns and scenic paths that traverse this botanical park.
More than three hundred varieties, such as muscari, hyacinths and daffodils, color the Park both in the woods in their natural form, and in perfectly designed flower beds.
Beyond the tulips, the park offers eighteen ponds, picturesque water surfaces around which lush, well-kept nature shines, and a labyrinth, the maze adorned with over 1,500 yew plants, the elegant conifer bearing red berries, devised by the owner Carlo Sigurtà.
The visit to Sigurtà Park takes at least a half-day. On weekend days in April, to enjoy the imposing and distinctive tulip bloom, crowds are high: if you prefer a bit of quiet and you have the option, choose weekdays.
Gardens of Castel Trauttmansdorff
At the foot of the Alps, in a position overlooking the spa town of Merano, the Gardens of Castel Trauttmansdorff have a feature that few other places in Italy can boast: thanks to the region’s exceptional microclimate, spring arrives a little earlier here and lasts a little longer. Already at the beginning of April, for example, you can stroll beneath blooming cherry trees and enjoy the mild spring sun.
Numerous violets and tulips welcome the season, including the Tulipa Trauttmansdorff, the first tulip of South Tyrol. In April the Gardens of Castel Trauttmansdorff spring to life with over 150,000 tulips in vibrant colors and shapes, including those with peony- and lily-flowered forms.
The park is also characterized by the presence of large magnolias, vividly colored oleanders, weeping willows, cypresses and olives, which benefit from the splendid Mediterranean climate. It spans 12 hectares and hosts eighty distinct botanical environments, divided into four thematic areas: the Forests of the World, the Gardens of the Sun, the Water and Terraced Gardens, and the Landscapes of South Tyrol. At its centre stands the great castle, home to the Touriseum, the Provincial Museum of Tourism. The gardens open from the beginning of April.
Padua’s Botanical Garden
The Padua Botanical Garden, founded in 1545, is the oldest in the world still in its original location: a place of science and beauty, for centuries. Its original design, with a clearly Renaissance and humanist imprint, consists of a central circle symbolizing the world, surrounded by a ring of water, with an inscribed square divided into four units by orthogonal paths oriented to the cardinal points. In 1997 UNESCO recognized it as a World Heritage Site.
In April the garden is open every day, offering the ideal moment to discover its most precious specimens, such as Goethe’s Palm, planted in 1585 and still alive, which inspired the German poet to develop his theory on the metamorphosis of plants. Or also: a 1750 Ginkgo tree and a magnolia believed to be the oldest in Europe, dating back to 1786.
Not to be missed, furthermore, is the Garden of Biodiversity, inaugurated in 2014: a 100-meter-long and 18-meter-high glass pavilion that houses over 1,300 species from around the world, organized by climate zones.
The Botanical Garden sits in the heart of Padua, just a few steps from Prato della Valle and the Basilica of Saint Anthony, making a visit easily combined with a full day of sightseeing in the city.
Villa della Pergola
On the hill overlooking Alassio, in Liguria, with the Gulf and Gallinara Island providing the backdrop, the Villa della Pergola Gardens guard every April something unique in Italy: the country’s most important collection of wisterias.
More than forty varieties in different shapes and colors wrap around pergolas and paths in a triumph of purple, pink and white cascades that spread a heady fragrance throughout the park.
The history of these wisterias is long and fascinating. English and Scottish families who stayed here around the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarded the flowering as a central event of the season, to the extent of celebrating it with genuine Wisteria Parties.
In spring, besides the wisterias, you can also admire rose blossoms and about forty varieties of citrus.
Botanical Gardens of Villa Taranto
On the Piedmontese shores of Lake Maggiore, in Pallanza, a district of Verbania, lies a garden whose existence owes much to a Times advertisement and the impulsive curiosity of a Scotsman: Neil Boyd McEacharn, heir to a wealthy shipping family and a botany enthusiast, bought the Villa Taranto estate in 1931 during a journey from Venice to London, after reading the advertisement for sale in the newspaper. What followed was one of the most ambitious private botanical projects of twentieth-century Italy: a park that today welcomes thousands of visitors each year among blooming paths and rare species from every corner of the world.
Here too, the main attraction is the Tulip Week: more than 80,000 bulbs in bloom, belonging to more than sixty-five different varieties. The heart of the show is the Tulip Maze: a serpentine path of about 400 meters that in spring becomes a riot of colors and fragrances.
Not only tulips, however, at Villa Taranto’s Gardens: the area dedicated to blossoming magnolias offers an equally evocative display between late March and early April, when the blooms transform the lawn below into a carpet of petals. The park also features eucalyptus, azaleas, rhododendrons, camellias, maples, and numerous tropical plants, arranged in themed zones.
Special attractions in the tropical plant greenhouses, where Victoria cruziana thrives, a giant South American water lily whose leaves reach two meters in diameter, and where there is a specimen of Emmenopterys henryi, which in 1971 produced the first-ever flowering in continental Europe.
