Giardini Reali

The Royal Gardens of Venice, connected to Piazza San Marco by a drawbridge, originated in the Napoleonic-era reform of the Marciana Area. Venice Gardens Foundation, headed by the President Adele Re Rebaudengo, reopened them to the public in 2019.
The Royal Gardens express the style of the Italian landscape Maestro Paolo Pejrone, to whom the Foundation entrusted their restoration. Lush and rich with unexpected perspectives, the Gardens, which include the Greenhouse and the Café Pavilion designed by L. Santi in 1817, regained their formal beauty and botanical complexity and returned to play a key role in the city's life. The intervention was conservative where the Gardens' design and architecture were concerned – with geometrical rigour of the flowerbeds that is typical of the nineteenth-century version of giardino all'italiana – but at the same time innovative and experimental from the botanical and gardening point of view, with plentiful freedom and exuberance evident in both. The gardens' heart is the long nineteenth-century pergola covered by two varieties of wisteria and of Podranea ricasoliana “Contessa Sara”; in the parterres, groves of Tetrapanax papyrifer, six-thousand Agapanthus with spectacular blooming, and thousands Farfugium, are interposed with paniculata and arborescens “Annabelle” hydrangeas, Ruscus, irises and myrtles. All around are numerous examples of Sophora; Pterocarye fraxinifolia; bamboo groves; dunes of Laurum, Pittosporum, Euonymus, and Elaeagnus, stronghold against the wind and salt; along the canal, there are large vases with pomegranate, fig, and loquat trees and viburnums.
The Royal Gardens, restored by Venice Gardens Foundation with the support of Generali Assicurazioni, are now preserved by the Foundation's gardeners.