The villa Farsetti garden in Santa Maria di Sala

The workshop offers an opportunity for reflecting on and raising awareness of the issue of role that a significant villa settlement can play in the contemporary landscape, in connection with its links with the social, cultural and territorial context

The work will be approached as a multidisciplinary design exploration to reflect on the history, current layout, future uses and ways to take care of a symbolic place for history of art, botany and Veneto landscape.

The villa Farsetti complex is the centre of Santa Maria di Sala’s public life. Now located in the midst of highly urbanised landscape still marked by and bearing the visible impression of Roman centuriation, it used to be a “garden of wonders”, whose botanical collections included exotic plants that spread from here to the rest of Italy and beyond. It used to be an actual botanical garden, a place for experimentation equipped with greenhouses, hothouses, cold and warm houses, and featuring the most sophisticated irrigation, humidification and heating systems, even superior to those then found at the University of Padua. At its peak it housed almost three thousand plants, including the first specimens of Magnolia grandiflora ever imported in Italy and some rare vines from Bourgogne.

Its rich history and its current condition, near the town centre of Santa Maria di Sala and closely connected to its social and cultural life, turn the place into a particularly interesting and significant case study for an assessment in the field of the relationship between historical garden studies – especially in connection to the “Venetian villa” phenomenon – and contemporary landscape design culture.