The green alphabet

The exhibition ‘Il Verde Alfabeto’ (The Green Alphabet) will be inaugurated on Saturday 19 March at 11 a.m. in the Villa Manin di Passariano conference hall. The exhibition is curated by the working group of the Project on FVG’s parks and historical gardens of the ERPAC cataloguing, promotion, valorisation and territory development service. The exhibition emphasises the importance of the cultural value of the historical parks and gardens of our region, an integral part of our cultural heritage, describing their nature, history, variety, their relationship with the landscape and the buildings they often surround.

Through a large map that geographically locates the precious green areas – true compendiums of art and nature – of our region, photographs, objects, historical publications and explanatory texts, the exhibition describes historic parks and gardens, both public and private and open to visitors, in Friuli Venezia Giulia, in their historical, botanical, artistic and design aspects, chosen from among the 400 identified and surveyed in the long work of cataloguing by the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region through Erpac, also with the support of the ‘Rotary for the Region’.

From the A for flowerbed to the G for grotto and ending with the Z for spring, through a ‘glossary’ presented on panels and a panoramic map, visitors will be able to ‘encounter’ the constituent elements that make up the various historic gardens and parks of Friuli Venezia Giulia through dozens of photographs, prints, graphics and objects on display. A section of the exhibition will be dedicated to a number of well-known personalities involved in the history of some of these places: from the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia to Giacomo Casanova, passing through Ernest Hemingway, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Amedeo Giacomini up to Russell Page, one of the most important landscape architects active in the 20th century, who designed the Vistorta garden near Sacile in the region.

All of them are in some way connected to gardens, parks or green routes that have seen their passage or that they themselves designed or helped to create. Further space will be dedicated to various 19th-century publications, both in English and French, rich in colour engravings, with evocative artistic interpretations of the floral world. The exhibition will also be enriched by the display of the original project drawn up for a private garden in Friuli in 1938 by the Piedmontese architect Giuseppe Roda, a descendant of the family of ‘gardeners’ of the House of Savoy, and himself a designer who created important parks in Italy and Europe.

A video tribute to the memory of landscape architect Paolo De Rocco completes the exhibition.

The exhibition, with free admission, will be inaugurated in the spring context of the event ‘Nel Giardino del Doge Manin’, (19 – 20 March at Villa Manin Park) promoted by ERPAC FVG, and organised by the Cooperativa sociale Agricola Monte San Pantaleone, a Trieste-based organisation with over forty years of experience in the care of greenery and the promotion of wellbeing through greenery, and will continue in the exhibition hall of the Barchessa di Levante until 3 July.

The ‘Il Verde Alfabeto’ (The Green Alphabet) exhibition represents a further stage in a very articulated path of knowledge, documentation and dissemination of Friuli Venezia Giulia’s historic parks and gardens that began in the 1990s with the first cataloguing of these assets (which, as indicated in the Cultural Heritage Code, are to be considered an expression of Italy’s cultural heritage) by what was then the FVG Regional Centre for the Cataloguing and Restoration of Cultural Heritage. This documentation and cataloguing activity in FVG was among the first and most thorough in Italy, so much so that it was cited and taken as a reference by other regions.

The title of the exhibition also echoes those of some guides published between 2018 and 2019 by Erpac on the subject, and produced thanks to a careful cataloguing and research activity to census the more than 400 historic gardens and parks, public and private, in Friuli Venezia Giulia, as well as the roccoli and bressane surveyed by the Region (La verde bellezza. Guida ai parchi e ai giardini storici pubblici del FVG, Forum, 2017; La verde sorpresa. Guida ai parchi e ai giardini storici privati del FVG, Gangemi, 2018 and La verde attrazione. Guida alle architetture del verde: uccellande storiche in Friuli, Gangemi, 2019; available in all bookshops and in the Villa Manin bookshop).

These guides, which are easy and pleasant to consult, were created to entice readers to visit the green sites in our region, and through the data collected in the scientific activity of cataloguing that distinguishes Erpac, more than 200 files that can be consulted on line have been created in the Catalogue of the Cultural Heritage of the Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia (www.ipac.regione.fvg.it).

The Historic Parks and Gardens project, which began, as we said, in the 1990s, is a line of research that Erpac has constantly followed and for which a large number of different actions have been carried out, such as publications, conferences, meetings, photographic and cataloguing campaigns and now an exhibition. These activities have made it possible not only to identify and study the historical parks and gardens in our territory, but also to document their transformations, since, unlike other assets, historical parks and gardens are ‘alive’ and constantly changing.

The exhibition is curated by the working group of the Project on FVG’s historic parks and gardens of the ERPAC’s Cataloguing, Promotion, Valorisation and Territorial Development Service (Umberto Alberini, Emiliana De Paulis, Mabel Englaro, Giorgia Gemo, Paolo Tomasella).

The Friuli Venezia Giulia Region promotes and supports interventions for the cataloguing, valorisation, enjoyment and knowledge of parks and gardens of historical and artistic value, having the nature of cultural or landscape and environmental assets and declared to be of cultural or public interest as provided for by Legislative Decree no. 42 of 22 January 2004 (Cultural Heritage and Landscape Code). The need to maintain, preserve, conserve and restore these fragile historical and cultural assets is a priority, sometimes an emergency, to which we will have to pay attention in the near future as their presence is widespread throughout the region.

The Parks and Historic Gardens project has always been supported by associations, scholars of the subject, including art historian Francesca Venuto, by the owners themselves and by technicians from the various public administrations involved.

The associations include: Consorzio per la Salvaguardia dei Castelli Storici del Friuli Venezia; Associazione Dimore Storiche Italiane (A.D.S.I.)- FVG; ‘Rotary for the Region’, a public interest action among the twenty Rotary Clubs of Friuli Venezia Giulia including the Rotary Club Codroipo – Villa Manin, Italia Nostra – FVG.

A full calendar of events including meetings, walks in the parks and initiatives for children is planned.