On either side were high walls and the air was deadened with exhaust fumes. I was wondering if four espressos for breakfast had been a good idea and if that Fiat charging down the back street was planning to gore me with its wing mirror. Then, suddenly, there was an archway, and through a darkened antechamber, a glimpse of something magical: a long vista of dappled green hedges on which stone statues seemed to float, and the regular vertical strokes of cypress trees, like musical rests, marking out some slow and ancient rhythm. The first sounds I heard on escaping from the street were birdsong and cicadas.
The Count Agostino Giusti, a Venetian nobleman, surely knew what he was doing when, in 1570, he began laying out his new garden on a hillside close to Verona. Speeding Fiats and pollution were not problems, but there were plenty of other dreadful things to be put out of mind: plague and marauding Ottomans, for example. The test of his garden's ability to transcend the mundane has always been a tough one.
Miraculously, the place remains intact, more or less as it was, and just a 10-minute walk from the city center, most of it very pleasant despite the occasional piece of macho driving. The garden, I can testify, still performs its heroic task of unburdening visitors of their troubles. It even works on the staff: as I wandered along the well-trimmed geometries of the lower acres, I saw a gardener who must have been nearing 70 who, for no apparent reason, was doing a ballet
pirouette.
The upper garden, wilder and less formal, is reached via a stone tower. Here in the top circle of paradise there's a small belvedere above the huge stone gargoyle that the count used to have spout fire during musical performances. Unfortunately that feature is out of action, but there's the pleasure of knowing Mozart, Goethe, Cosimo de Medici and dozens of other luminaries stood on this spot and admired much the same view.
The trouble with paradise, however, is the redevelopers -- they always want to get their hands on it. Giardino Giusti is up for sale, the site having remained in the same family for almost 500 years.
"Of course I want to see it preserved," says Count Nicolo Giusti, who co-owns the garden with a group of cousins. "But none of us live in Verona now. It needs a prominent institution to handle the type of problems that the garden has. If for example a wall collapses or a statue
disintegrates, we have to restore them in an historically accurate way. That's time-consu-ming and expensive."
Lovers of the place, however, fear that the price tag of more than US$18m will attract the wrong kind of investors -- an air of uncertainty hangs over this paradise. Perhaps impermanence is just one of those things gardens learn to live with. On the far side of town from Giardino Giusti, there's a reminder of humanity's rather dim record in the management of paradise. At the church of San Zeno Maggiore, carved into a pair of bronze doors, Adam and Eve are shown being thrown out of Eden.
Dating from as early as 1030, these artistic masterpieces are filled with signs and symbols of man's desire to reach perfection, culminating in Christ being carried to heaven by angels.
Verona and the region around it, the Veneto, have a long involvement in this tricky question, an involvement best deliberated in the city's Piazza Erbe, preferably sitting in a pavement cafe behind a glass of Aperol Sprizz -- the local favorite aperitif.
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