Why the Giusti Garden's cypress avenue and its mask on the hill are worth the walk across the river

A garden that climbs out of the city

Giardino Giusti sits behind Palazzo Giusti on the left bank of the Adige, in the Veronetta quarter, and it does something few gardens in Verona can manage: it starts flat and formal, with clipped box hedges and statues, then climbs a steep wooded slope to terraces that look straight back across the river at the towers and domes of the old city.

It is still owned by the Giusti family, who have held the site for centuries and keep it, in their own words, in the old manner. When the Grand Tour brought poets, artists and crowned heads through Verona, a visit here became close to obligatory, and the garden still works well as a pause between churches and museums, especially for anyone who has spent a morning indoors.

From wool dyers to a nobleman's paradise

The Giusti family arrived in Verona from Tuscany in the late thirteenth century and worked in wool dyeing. In 1406 Provolo Giusti bought land beside the old Roman road, the Via Postumia, and the family's dye works stood on the site until the sixteenth century, when the working buildings gave way to a palace with a formal garden attached.

The change is credited to Agostino Giusti, a diplomat who served the Medici and the Republic of Venice, a member of Verona's philharmonic academy and a collector of Roman inscriptions. Accounts differ on when work began, with some sources pointing to around 1570 and others dating the planting of the garden to 1580.

The garden was admired early: the English traveler Thomas Coryat visited in 1611 and is said to have called it a second paradise. The Austrian emperor later let the family style themselves Giusti del Giardino, of the garden, folding the site into the family name itself.

Visitors, changes and the storm of 2020

A long line of notable guests is recorded here, among them Cosimo the Third de' Medici, the French writer Charles de Brosses, the Emperor Joseph the Second, King Carlo Felice of Sardinia, Tsar Alexander the First, John Ruskin and, by the garden's own account, the young Mozart in 1769. Goethe came in 1786 and admired an ancient cypress near the entrance, which he mentioned in his Italian Journey.

The layout was never frozen in time. The parterres took their present form in 1765, and the maze was redesigned in 1786 by the architect Luigi Trezza. The garden suffered during the Second World War, and the maze was rebuilt afterward, with a further restoration recorded in the 1990s.

A violent storm on 23 August 2020 did lasting damage, killing the Goethe cypress and roughly thirty other trees, about a third of the total, along with parts of the maze, boxwood in the parterres and three seventeenth-century statues. The garden was placed on a list of Europe's most endangered heritage sites as a result.

The cypress avenue and the lower garden

The central axis of the lower garden is the cypress avenue, a long straight walk between dark, narrow trees that draws the eye to the grotto and the mask on the hillside beyond. Many of the cypresses now lining it are young, planted after the 2020 storm to replace losses, so the avenue looks slimmer than it does in older photographs and will take years to regain its former density.

On either side of the avenue, square parterres edged with box form green rooms in the Italian style. Look for five statues of Diana, Venus, Atalanta, Apollo and Adonis by the sculptor Lorenzo Muttoni, for pots of citrus trees linked to the golden fruit of the mythical Garden of the Hesperides, and for Roman inscriptions and fragments drawn from Agostino Giusti's own collection.

Beside the avenue is a maze sometimes called one of the oldest in Europe, its paths still open to walk today. Hedges and paths damaged in the 2020 storm were restored and replanted, so the maze remains part of a standard visit rather than a ruin kept behind glass.

The grotto, the tower and the mask

At the end of the avenue the garden turns theatrical. A sixteenth-century grotto front leads into a vaulted chamber still decorated with shells, corals, mother-of-pearl and sponges, with a back wall once lined in mirrors; a small grotto chapel here is dated 1591.

A tower beside the fourteenth-century city walls holds a winding staircase, described by the garden as secret, which climbs to the upper garden and the terraces above the avenue. This is the route for anyone heading up rather than staying among the parterres.

Above the grotto looms the mascaron, a huge grotesque face carved into the hillside and attributed to Bartolomeo Ridolfi, once designed to belch flames and smoke at startled guests. The terrace at its level works as a belvedere, and the highest points of the garden give one of the widest views over Verona's rooftops.

How to visit

The entrance is at Via Giardino Giusti 2 in Veronetta. Individual visitors do not need to book ahead; tickets are sold at the garden's own ticket office and online, while groups larger than ten are asked to arrange a visit by email in advance. A combined ticket also covers Palazzo Maffei, and guided tours can be arranged for those who want them. Check the garden's own site for current opening times before setting out, and see booking ahead for more on tickets.

The upper garden is reached by stairs and steep paths, so the lower parterres and the cypress avenue are the easier part of the visit for anyone with limited mobility. The period apartment inside the palace, which shows how the Giusti family lived, is a separate part of the visit and worth the extra few minutes.

The garden sits roughly ten minutes on foot from the city center and pairs naturally with other sights on this side of the river. Cross Ponte Pietra, take in the Roman theater, and finish with the view from Castel San Pietro, or walk the route in reverse and end the day among the cypresses.