(…) I crossed my second threshold and I definitively emerged from the darkness of the forest, metaphor of that spirit overshadowed by the lack of knowledge. I found myself in front of some long avenues converging towards a focal point. I felt my lungs suddenly revive: the light was no longer held back and it inspired me a sense of security. Everything seemed here at eye level and apparently accessible. However, I felt that the mystery of life had not been fully revealed to me yet. Or rather my inner defenses were still high. I consequently got still more passionated and involved in observing around me and I realized that I had just entered the so-called area of the French gardens:  the second and essential step of my green Vatican journey. Together with the English grove, the Italian garden, the Teutonic garden and recent Japanese garden, they now form the enormous 22-hectared eclectic (or revival) style gardens, also called Neo-Renaissance style gardens. (….)

(please learn more about my next cultural meeting on google meet: https://www.periegeta.it/events/on-the-path-to-the-divine-the-papal-eclectic-gardens-at-the-vatican/) and all the other ones between November and January: https://www.periegeta.it/events/seeing-beyond-borders-our-paths-to-the-divine-through-art-my-cultural-meetings-between-november-2020-and-the-end-of-january-2021/ 

(…) The historical Italian, Arab, French and English gardens, vegetable gardens and steingarten or rock gardens, were taken as a model and eclectically developed for our gardens here until they assumed an autonomous physiognomy and identity. In the essay Italian villas and their gardens, published in 1904 after her journey to Italy, the American writer Edith Wharton proposed an exotic idea of the  Mediterranean flora and Italian gardens. An idea that spread quickly in the Anglo-Saxon area where it merged with the informal composition of the English gardens turning into an “eclectic-Mediterranean” garden: an ideal set for the emerging Hollywood filmmaking industry, developping in the Mediterranean climate of California. Both natural and artistic, this kind of a garden was perceived through the senses and comparable to a library: an enchanted and secret place, where mind and spirit would be nourished by ever greater and newer horizons. (…)

(from Anima Persa Anima Ritrovata, periegesi all’interno dei giardini vaticani by Anna Bruno, Chap. II pg. 91 and 93, Palombi Editori – Rome, 2017)

If you like to receive the book, please write to annabruno@periegeta.it