Biennale Gardens

In Venice the public gardens are greatly appreciated much more than anywhere else, being the only piece of landscape where the eye can rest upon some green and the foot tread upon sandy paths”. This is a quote from an Italian magazine dated 1895, reviewing the First Universal Exhibition; even today, the sight of the Biennale Gardens, just a few steps from CoZy House Venice, fills the beholder with peace and tranquility.

It was Napoleon who made the decision to build the gardens at the beginning of the XIX century when it was established that Venice needed a green area. This decision was not easy to implement at all: to get a piece of land devoid of buildings some churches and convents were torn down along with the evidence of a piece of history of the city itself.

Nowadays the entry to the gardens is on the very spot where once S. Domenico church and convent were standing. S. Domenico convent was founded in the IV century and since 1560 it had been the seat of the Tribunal and Jail of the Holy Office of the Inquisition: Giordano Bruno was imprisoned there right after his arrest before being taken to Rome like many other free thinkers accused of heresy. Unlike elsewhere, in Venice the convicted heretics were not burned at the stake but drowned at night in the Laguna with no hustle and bustle. Book-burning was instead a common practice in Venice for those books deemed to spread ideas not in line with the Holy Office of the Inquisition: every year on 29th of April the friars would burn all the prohibited books confiscated throughout the year at S. Domenico’s bridge across S. Anna’s stream, now partly an underground watercourse flowing under via Garibaldi. The exact place where now we celebrate culture, imagination, innovation and diversity with the Biennale exhibitions was once the symbol and seat of narrow-mindedness, imagination censorship and thought control.

It was decided to tear down Saint Anthony convent too, which was well known in Venice due to a much less tragic practice compared to the Holy Inquisition’s ones: up to 1409 the monks on the pretext of veneration of Saint Anthony would let their pigs roam freely around the city, the believers would take care of feeding them but the pigs would end up as delicious meals for the prior. Even the convent of the capuchin nuns of Castello, named Concette, founded at the end of the XVII century at senator Francesco Vendramin’s behest as well as the Sailors’ Hospice built at the end of XV century to host-in the name of Lord Jesus Christ- all disabled sailors and soldiers who had been fighting for the Venetian Republic had to give room to the Gardens. The debris collected from the demolished buildings was used to strengthen the ground and fill in the nearby S. Anna’s canal to build via Eugenia (now via Garibaldi).

Nowadays the gardens are divided into two parts: the area which hosts the pavilions of the Biennale art and achitecture exhibitions and the green area with the public gardens where you can take a stroll amid century-old trees and statues built in memory of the protagonists of history and the arts.