A Journey in the Gardens of Europe

Architects, landscape designers, princes, writers, intellectuals and scholars travelled across Europe for centuries, visiting gardens, admiring landscapes and drawing inspiration from them.
Notebooks, letters and journals, whether published or stowed away in archives allow us to reconstruct itineraries, and journey with our senses to places of beauty, witnessing the continent’s histories and cultures.

The exhibition unfolds across adventurous storylines, structured into twelve sections: paintings, drawings, wooden models and other objects showcase famous sixteenth- to early twentieth-century gardens: from the Italian geometrical settings to the prospective escapes of their French counterparts and the “picturesque” elements of English landscape architectures.

In the context of the Reggia di Venaria and its Gardens, this journey - through the works of dozens of artists - travels across the Italy of the “Grand Tour” and the Europe of kingdoms and empires, whose gardens of villas and palace function at once as loci of power and “fashionable” phenomenon, summoning distant and dreamed worlds.

Curated by Vincenzo Cazzato, Paolo Cornaglia, Maurizio Reggi, with the contribution of Paolo Pejrone
In partnership with the Polytechnic University of Turin-Department of Architecture and Design (DAD) and the Association of Italian Parks and Gardens (Associazione Parchi e Giardini d’Italia, APGI).
Under the patronage of ARRE, Association des Résidences Royales Européennes.