Garden politics

From the late 1810s onwards, English landscape gardens became popular among many Paduan notabili, mainly moderate liberals who aspired to social leadership. Installing such gardens was therefore much more than a form of aesthetic expression, but also a means of social and political differentiation. Several features, like masonic and historicist elements, but also collections of specific plants and the involvement of the famished population during the crop failure of 1816, provide precious insight into the political and social convictions of the park owners. Andrea and Giuseppe Meneghini’s father was the second member of Padua’s social elite who, in 1816, commissioned the architect Giuseppe Jappelli to plan a landscape installation, based on Virgil’s ‘The voyage of Aeneas to the underworld’, around his splendid villa in the Euganean Hills south of Padua. However, ultimately Agostino Meneghini chose to invest his capital into the therapeutic healing thermal springs that attracted numerous visitors.