History of the Park

The English Garden in Palermo (1851-1853), an urban park for the new city
Eliana Mauro

After the eighteenth-century, the season of the great parks of the Palermitan aristocracy was identifiable as the founding elements of the Enlightenment landscape outside the city due to the coexistence of the components of the “useful” and the “pleasurable”. The first half of the nineteenth century saw a proliferation in Palermo of private pleasure gardens with an informal layout, i.e. free of the need to create axial perspectives and geometric forms. After the mid-century era, the “romantic” culture, which cultivated the artistic landscape of garden design, overtaking the contradictory nature of components linked to the informal nature of “rational” thought, expressed by the terms of a new landscape aesthetic which found its own substratum in the neoclassical matrix of the Palermo garden.
In the landscape of the seafront of the city of Palermo, the Villa Giulia, the “public parterre” par excellence, created in the French style 1,  had dominated since 1777.
The events of the Risorgimento distinctively affected the future of urban development northwards through the creation of an important road axis, Via della Libertà, and another public garden, the English Garden, designed and created by Giovan Battista Filippo Basile (Palermo, 1825-1891) in collaboration with his master of academic studies, Carlo Giachery (Padua 1812-Palermo 1865) and his patron, the director of the university Botanical Garden, Vincenzo Tineo (Palermo, 1791-1856).2
The planting of a new public city garden paved the way for the application of new naturalistic theories that were also experimented in the field of painting, 3 offering the opportunity to “modernize” new urban expansion with the introduction of a park that became the field of experimentation for the planting of new species, often newly introduced and to be used in private gardens.
The first section of the Via della Libertà and the English Garden emerged in perfect symbiosis and landscape gardening for several decades from 1851 onwards. The terminal of that street proved similar within the intentions of those who had conceived it – to a Parisian boulevard.
The garden was proposed as an alternative to the large private parks of the aristocracy and its realization for the city, provided a great opportunity destined to exert a radical influence on its urban development as a driving force for future expansion. In anticipation of the construction of a district with multi-story buildings for the new bourgeoisie, the garden represented a practice of implementation of the idea of appropriating the countryside outside the city gates.
A formulized group of specialists from different disciplines were called upon to oversee the design and realization of the new garden which included Vincenzo Tineo (botanist), Carlo Giachery (architect expert in utilitarian constructions and new technologies) and, later, Giovan Battista Filippo Basile. The formulation of a vastly innovative nature for the city must be related to the two most important civic institutions for controlling and managing urban development: the Building Council, established in 1842, the Municipal Architectural Corps, established in 1856, and finally the Technical Building Office, which followed in 1863 and in which Basile held the position of Chief Engineer. 4

For the construction of the road, a deep cut had to be made in the calcarenite rock that reconstructs the geomorphological plane of the city in several places raised above the plane of the road idealized to be built. The stones were reused in the building activities of the garden, but the most characteristic element of the area remained in its very irregular elevation.
Exploiting the characteristics of the terrain, G.B.F. Basile organized an authentic historical-symbolic orchestration, alluding to an emiral island government that had been historically renowned for its tolerance, livability, caves and natural ravines to give shape and meaning to the English-style public garden.
The main division of the garden stems from its topographical position crossed by the new street and the physical components that straddling it. The garden will consist of two parts of different sizes &sides: The Forest, the former “garden of delight of the Emir Al Achal”, being large and hilly on the right of the street. To the left is the Parterre, the “modern” part of the garden being much smaller and on a single levelt. At the time of its realization, Basile would ensure that the street and the garden would appear as a single organism incorporating the areas destined for small gardens in the front of the homes into the overall arrangement and postponing the realization of the future fence (whose grating, removed for the “iron to the homeland” operation, would be replaced in the post-war years with the present one).
In the Sheet of explanations that accompanied the project, drawn up by Basile in 1850, the theme of “the Emir Al Hachal’s” garden dominates. It is the pretext to present the Forest as a “restoration of ancient delight” and to introduce the hypothetical existence of Arab and Greek architecture.
The Forest will be divided into seven promontories, places titular to epochs or historical figures: the Pagoda (first); the Castle and Saracen Tower (second); Archimedes (third); Psyche (fourth); the Temple of Vesta (fifth); Nina, the 13th-century Sicilian poetess (sixth); and the Hut (seventh). Each promontory is bordered by one or more valleys in a number of ten and aggregates caves and natural galleries in while each landscape environment is assigned the appropriate tall tree species and herbaceous plants.
The Forest, on the side of the maximum extension to the urban promenade, as well as, on the opposite side of the road. The “modern part” of the garden, is the Parterre, which is less extensive and designed in parterres, consisting of a grotto, grove and fountains. 5
The “Direction of the Royal Botanical Garden and Public Plantations of Palermo”, directed by Vincenzo Tineo, from which depicted the realization of the entire urban section ; the two parts of the garden, the street, the restoration of the façade of the Prison of the Crosses, demolished for the construction of the street, the restyling of the few existing houses bordering the garden , the scientific-botanical choices, the garden’s furnishing of a great variety of flowering plants and large number of trees. Ever selection was carefully chosen and shared by the designer, suited to his design choices and with the attribution of naturalistic habitats to each hill and valley created. 6
The altimetric variations obtained by Basile, still allow for detailed views even below street level, despite the transformations carried out around the 1930s; the garden’s attractiveness is based on the elements of surprise that multiplied the spaces and cultivated species in the transition from the valleys to the grottoes, the summits and of the promontories. The enjoyment of Parterre, on the other hand, springs from the coplanarity of the entire space enclosed by the natural “cliff”, but also from the views from the top of the rock face 7, where the Marchese Ugo street is realized. 8
Conceived on the model of the Parisian boulevards 9, with a central carriageway enriched by two rows of plane trees and two driveways on either side and wide pavements, Via della Libertà had the new public garden as its goal until almost the end of the 19th century.
Having been created as a “new destination for a new city 10, the English Garden could hardly have maintained its character as a backdrop, though the work undertaken to regularize and extend Via della Libertà did not immediately have the desired effect. It was necessary to wait until the pavilions of the first Sicilian Agricultural Exhibition 11 which were built in 1902, designed by Ernesto Basile, a few dozen meters from the northern boundary of the garden. The ephemeral arrangement provided for a bridge/gateway thrusted between the two road margins and an entrance pavilion, to the side, behind which were the areas of the various exhibition sectors. The building and the bridge, with its clear modernist features, ferried the street towards the extension and its final destination in the master plan, and even though this second long stretch of the street had the roadway reduced to a single carriageway, the character of a street lined with rows of plane trees and flanked by gardens and tree-lined squares still remains its distinguishing feature 12.
In designing the garden, G.B.F. Basile, remained with his thoughts on modern architectural lines, also envisaged that the new residential quarter, which would rise along the street and around the English Garden, would be a renewed example “of mediaeval architecture”, and proposed it, almost as a prototype of his idea, for the reconstruction of the façades of the adjoining Prison of the Crosses 13.
The body of the conventual structure bordering the garden, consisting of three wings and the church of Santa Maria di Monserrato which leaned against the east side and obtained from the central rooms of the ancient Renaissance villa, which had in fact been mutilated by cut for the construction of the road and left without a façade in correspondence with the new street. This would be an opportunity for G.B.F. Basile to configure a façade with a pointed arch and stepped openings, resting on top of the exposed limestone rock relief that can still be seen today, and that evokes his vision of those renewed medieval forms that would have represented the “missing link” and resolved the contradictions between “ancient” and “modern” in architecture 14.

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