The urban garden has always occupied a very small, almost residual space in the city of Perugia, forced to compress its development within the circuit of its walls. Only a few aristocratic families could afford to devote a part of the grounds pertaining to their palazzo to a garden. An exception was made by the two broad spaces flanking the Bourbon di Sorbello family’s “Casino di S. Spirito”, one given over to an ornamental garden and the other to a genuine botanical garden. The access road has kept the name “Via del Giardino”, already present in the Gregorian cadastre, even though its original function has been lost. Of quite another extent were the spaces given over to vegetable gardens, and in particular the monastic ones, foremost among which, for size and quality of layout, were those of the Olivetan Benedictines of Monte Morcino Nuovo and the Cassinese Benedictines of San Pietro. Outside the walls, the broad belt of the suburbs was divided into farmsteads that surrounded the country residences of the landowners, in the form of a villa or a holiday retreat, each provided with a garden space in front. In this situation, fixed in time, the space of the garden, modest not only for its contained dimensions but also for its simple arrangement, fulfilled the function of the enjoyment of a portion of nature domesticated for ornamental purposes and ordered into the geometry of flowerbeds, as against the wider expanse of nature cultivated for food in the surrounding countryside.

But time began to change, and already at the Provincial Exhibition of Fine Arts, Agriculture and Industry in the Province of Perugia, organised by the Economic-Agrarian Society in 1858, Class II was devoted to the products of “Agriculture, Horticulture and Gardening”. In this last category, which was at last receiving official recognition, the only exhibitor was Count Zeffirino Faina, with ornamental flowers and plants grown at his villa at Murelli.
A further decisive step came with the Artistic, Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition of the Province of Perugia, organised in the provincial capital by a committee set up for the purpose in 1879. On that occasion, not only was “Gardening” confirmed, placed within Class II of the products of the special agricultural industries, but the exhibitors joining Zeffirino Faina were Alessandro Oddi Baglioni and Tancredi Bourbon di Sorbello, and, for the first time, Leone and Fiorenzo Palomba, gardeners by profession, took part as well. To Leone Palomba the jury awarded the “silver medal, not only for the plants he exhibited, but also for the good taste with which he decorated the interior of the Exhibition Palace”, confirming the increased regard now reserved for gardening.
The sign of the new times was confirmed too by the settling in Perugia of Ferdinando Belliere, a French gardener who had followed from the Marche his brother-in-law Ferdinando Cesaroni, owner of a small villa near the Frontone garden with a vast plot given over to a nursery. Belliere, who described himself as a “Horticulturist”, presented his business as the “Design of picturesque Gardens and Parks in the latest taste. Ornamental and woodland trees for public promenades”. The time and space of the garden had truly changed.

In another time, close to our own, the garden won itself a new space through the work of Pietro Porcinai, an undisputed master in the art of gardens, who worked in Umbria from 1936 to 1984, and in Perugia in particular from 1942.

In September of that year, Bruno Buitoni, a member of one of the city’s most prominent families, wishing to create a small garden at his suburban villa, contacted Porcinai, who had been “warmly recommended” to him by Professor Torrigiani of Florence. A modest commission, which was nonetheless accepted and carried out despite the difficulties created by the war, and which would give Porcinai the chance for encounters, fostered by Buitoni, with leading figures of Perugian society that would translate into as many commissions: the podestà Giulio Agostini, the Peano-Frè family, and the architect Pietro Frenguelli, site director of the works at Villa Buitoni, with whom Porcinai would form a professional working relationship. The bond with the Buitoni family (Bruno would be joined by his wife Alba and his son Franco) would continue over time with other projects (the villa at Sanfatucchio and the “Perugina” plant) and would bring Porcinai further commissions from the executives of “Perugina” (Angelini, Bartoccioli and, above all, the general manager Giovanni Faina). The Buitonis, on the industrial side, and the physician Angelo Barola, on the professional side, would open to Porcinai the exclusive world of the bourgeoisie that operated in the hinterland of the regional capital, beginning with the Spagnoli family, partners of the Buitonis in the ownership of “Perugina”, then the Colussi, the Mignini and the Petrini families, who worked in the agri-food sector, and finally the textile industrialists too, such as Leonardo Servadio, who commissioned Porcinai with the external layout of the Ellesse plant and of his own country residence, as well as Fernando Ciai and Umberto Ginocchietti.
This wealthy clientele, which had won positions of prominence on the national and international stage, had nonetheless not troubled to translate the success achieved and the great economic power acquired into ostentation in their own residences. A voluntary renunciation of any display of their status, which the landed aristocracy had by contrast pursued, entrusting to prestigious city palazzi, to sumptuous suburban villas and even to the patronage of altars in churches the attestation of their own supremacy, and preserving, despite economic decline and even the extinction of the family, the survival of the name in the titling of the buildings, which still transmits the memory of this historic pre-eminence.
The villas, sometimes simple farmhouses, of the industrial bourgeoisie reveal a measured affluence, never brazenly flaunted, and to this calm tone Porcinai’s work too adheres, conferring on these places, through the elegance of its forms, the mastery of its plant associations, and the functional insertion of natural materials, wood and stone, to mark the transitions and divide up the spaces, that quality which relegates the anonymous architecture to the role of a discreet backdrop. Porcinai’s garden thus becomes the hallmark that grants these places a special distinction with respect to the many villas and farmhouses, sometimes of even greater merit, found in the suburban areas.
Although the surfaces involved are very small, the solutions Porcinai adopts tend to recreate a space of nature to be offered as a pleasant setting for sociability and entertainment, one that takes on the role of the living room.
The function of the garden becomes twofold: on the one hand, to enhance, with a skilful scenography of vegetal “architecture”, the modest architecture of the residence, which could not compete with the prestigious historic villas of the landed aristocracy; on the other, to attest to the attained condition of opulent ease, entrusted above all to two amenities, the tennis court and the swimming pool, which were the features of the garden dedicated to the exercise of sociability.
While the tennis court was rigorously defined in its dimensions and materials by the rules of the game, and left little room for intervention, it was above all the swimming pool that took the measure of the landscape architect, who revealed himself in the choice of setting, in the design of the forms of the water, in the plant associations, in the use of materials and in the care for detail, so as to achieve the aim of giving a peculiar and distinctive character to the arrangement of the place.
Porcinai’s works, and the sometimes troubled relations with his clients, have been the subject of painstaking research carried out by a working group set up by the “Associazione Pietro Porcinai” under an agreement drawn up with the Region of Umbria. The imposing body of documentation gathered has been summarised in a publication, “I giardini di Pietro Porcinai in Umbria”, published in 2014 by the Region and edited by the present writer and Marina Fresa.

But the time and space of the garden were destined to change. This society of able entrepreneurs and established professionals, which attached such importance to the garden that it entrusted its design to a specialist of recognised skill and great worth, has by now died out, and the gardens designed by Porcinai, save for rare exceptions, have been left stripped of their original function and, what is more, orphaned both of their designer and of their clients. The vision of the garden has changed, and we can gauge the measure of the distance from Porcinai’s designs in the lost centrality of the “sitting place” as a spot of rest, reposeful for the body and salutary for the mind; in the blinding of the visual cones onto the surrounding landscape once framed by arboreal wings; in the reversal of the accesses, now subservient to the motorcar, whereas the studied modelling of the ground of the pedestrian paths crossing the site, relegating the vehicular ones to marginal positions and burying the garage underground, prevented any intrusion of cars into what Porcinai, writing to Alba Buitoni, considered the “intimate” part of the garden.
Unlike architecture, the garden is a complex living organism that demands constant attention and maintenance, calling for specialised staff by now hard to find. A very demanding task which Porcinai, aware of these problems, had sought to lighten by directing his design choices predominantly towards shrub and tree species rather than herbaceous and flowering ones, so as to reduce the work of upkeep. An awareness confirmed by his predilection for the contained scale of spaces, expressed also in one of his writings, “Designs for small and medium-sized gardens”, and made explicit in the phrase: “it is worth more to have a small garden, but well kept, than a large one left to neglect”.
This mutation in the function of the garden is even more evident in public commissions. Truly exceptional may be considered the first commission conferred on Porcinai by the Municipality of Perugia in 1948, to transform into an urban park the impassable and degraded ditch of the Cupa, after two years of fruitless attempts which had, nonetheless, served the social function of “relief of unemployment”. Porcinai, by suitably modelling the terrain, obtained a broad space open to the public, planted with a vegetation that recalled, in a renewed dialogue with the walls, the character of the Umbrian rural landscape, with holm oaks, olives and cypresses. The stone seats of the sitting places and the sandstone slabs for the walkways across the lawn answered to the logic of functional furnishings that combined solidity and durability of materials, able to withstand intensive use, with the sober elegance of their forms. Conceived at a time when the surroundings were densely inhabited, the garden of the Cuparella now suffers from the devitalisation of the place. There is no point in inserting incongruous amenities if there is no strategy for the resettlement of inhabitants and activities, and therefore if there is no public able to enjoy a public garden.
Equally exceptional were the choices of the Municipality of Perugia to set aside as gardens two areas highly desirable for more lucrative uses. So it was in the case of Piazza Fortebraccio, where, to fill the “void” created in 1939 by the demolition of an entire block, with plans already ready for new building, it was decided instead to lay out (1951) the garden conceived by Porcinai, later deprived not only of any form of maintenance, but also of the capacity to adapt to changes in its context.
More troubled were the vicissitudes of the other place, the former Piazza d’Armi which, emptied of the presence of the “Tenaglia” redoubt, destroyed together with the Rocca Paolina in 1860, was used for military drills and for the cattle fair. The idea, cherished in the 1920s and 1930s, of devoting this broad, desolate space to a celebratory “Victory Park” had been promptly taken up by several architects (Angelini, Lilli, Tarchi, Bazzani), and among the solutions offered the one formally chosen (1928) was that of Pietro Angelini, which, however, never came to concrete fruition. To overcome this stalemate, a national competition was announced in 1946 for the urban arrangement of the square, and the four joint winners were assigned the task of drawing up a detailed plan, which envisaged the construction of four large buildings for public offices and commercial activities in the northern part and of the stadium in the southern part, beside the monastic complex of S. Giuliana, relegating the greenery to the residual spaces with a parterre garden between the buildings and a wooded area towards the monastery. To give form to the place, the Municipality turned once again to Porcinai, entrusting him with the “Tree planting of the former Piazza d’Armi and of the other public gardens of the city” (1952). The proposed solution, overturning the one put forward by the competition, envisaged the creation of a dense urban wood set among the new buildings and a lawn area bordered by trees with a telescoped view onto the façade of S. Giuliana. Porcinai’s vision, however, was not taken up: the wooded area was given over to a bus station with no valid architectural outcome, and asphalt took the place of the connective tissue of vegetation that was to have enfolded the built fabric.
Thus the city of Perugia, which at a time when no one would have expected it had entrusted a great designer like Pietro Porcinai with the care of its public gardens, has been left without gardens, and no one seems to have noticed. Time has run out and space has been annulled.

The authors have been members of the “Associazione Pietro Porcinai” since its foundation and, together with Marina Fresa, editors of the publication “i giardini di Pietro Porcinai in Umbria”, published by the Umbrian Region in 2014.