THE RESTORATION PROJECT. THE TOPOGRAPHICAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE LATE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY LAYOUT
(by Ada Segrè).

The plan for landscaping the southern flat part of the garden predisposes a subdivision of the spaces which accords as far as possible with the late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century layouts.

This is not an easy undertaking, as the documentation and the historical plans relating to the garden which emerged in the course of the studies were of particularly relevance to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

With the exception of a sketch in Schickhardt’s travel journal (1599), which portrays the garden of the Satyr and the south loggia, there are no known designs or plans of the garden for the period between the middle of the sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth centuries.

In 1996, the year in which began the first phase of the preparation of the plan for restoration (proposed by Ghigino and Calvi), the garden consisted of fragments of the nineteenth-century layout, and therefore had the character of a romantic park, with examples of trees, single and in groups, and chaotic undergrowth which had grown up spontaneously over the years.

It was a park wrapped in semi-shade, thick and wild, in which it was hard to distinguish a plan of any sort. At the centre, however, there was still the Fountain of Neptune, with its rich marble group consisting of horses and marine monsters, and delimited by twelve marble eagles. Following the rediscovery of the basins of the fountains of the seasons and of the eighteenth-century ones, the owners expressed the wish to return to the formal garden.

It was soon clear that it would be preferable to evoke the sixteenth- seventeenth-century plan, in that it was far more representative of the period of the palace’s maximum splendour. The alternative easiest to put into practice, however, was that of redoing the late-eighteenth-century layout, with wider paths than those of the sixteenth century, enriched with fountains of various shapes on the central axis parallel to the palace (east-west), placed at the centre of two parterres de broderie of French inspiration.
In this layout the four fountains of the season would have been sunk into the ground, while the twelve sculpted benches which ringed the basin of the of the Fountain of Neptune would have placed twice as far from it as in the original arrangement.

Given the difficulty of basing the work on documents, it was necessary to turn to a stratigraphic method of study and to close observation of the architectural features surviving in the garden. This led to the rediscovery of the principal axes; the central one starts at the door of the ramp which joins the upper terrace to the garden, and continues by way of the Fountain of Neptune as far as the entrance to the sea loggia.

Amongst the secondary axes, it is worth mentioning the perspective ones which start from the wall fountain, with lion protomes and semi-hexagonal basins, and stretch towards the southern edge of the garden, including the bases of the statues of the seasons. From the first stages, a double grill-system was proposed as the basis for the project, in accordance with the design techniques of the time, based on the dimensions of the wall fountain (5 x 8 Genoese palms, or 1.24 m x 1.98 m), which led to the realization of the first topographical reconstruction of the Renaissance ground plan.

The theoretical model has been found to match substantially the archaeological investigations, and this goes to show that the plan for restoration put forward by Agr. Ada Segrè and Arch. Pietro Moncagatto copies spatially the landscape layout created by Giovanni Andrea I Doria. The garden is subdivided into three parts by the two axes which start from the entrance to the tunnels under the upper terrace, while the central part is crossed by the main axis of the garden, which links the access ramp, passing through the Fountain of Neptune, to the entrance to the sea loggia. Each of these parts (west, central and east) is composed of eight principal panels, resulting from the first and second division into compartments, in turn divided by four with a third row of paths into thirty-two panels.

The compartments are divided by strips, oblong beds arranged in a ring, 3 Genoese palms wide (0.774 m). The measurements which have been extrapolated are confirmed by the sixteenth-century treatises, documents and in the dimensions of similar beds observed in other contemporary gardens. The particular design of the individual compartments is invented, however, but realized in accordance with the current models of the late sixteenth century in general and those of Genoa in particular. The plan predisposes the inclusion of two tunnel-shaped pergolas on the two north-south axes, which continue conceptually the tunnels underneath the porticoed wings of the upper terrace. The presence of pergolas in the garden is not documented, but the discovery of stone socket for holding poles, as well as the ascertained width of the paths, indicate the presence of such structures.

An arrangement of this sort is portrayed in a seventeenth-century picture entitled Design of the Villas, Palaces and Houses of His Excellency at Pegli, which depicts the Palazzo Doria at Pegli, very similar in landscape structure to Palazzo del Principe. This drawing, amongst many known, confirms the presence of tunnel-pergolas in the area of Genoa . The inclusion of pergolas is therefore an introduction by way of analogy, and serves to create shaded paths in a garden, which is in fact mostly exposed to the full sun.

The part of the garden to the east, at present not available for restoration, was eroded by nineteenth-century modifications to the building, which was widened by 5 m. The work on the west side of the garden will be undertaken in a subsequent phase, bearing in mind the discoveries in the trapezoidal area beside it, where was positioned the famous aviary. The beds next to the sustaining wall of the upper terrace and those of the boundary wall to the south are parallel to those walls and 5 Genoese palms wide (1.24 m).

In the northern part have been found channels for bringing water which overflowed from the semi-hexagonal basins and irrigated these beds. The brick base on which these channels rested and part of the channel itself, were found in their original position, confirming the dimensions of the bed and its antiquity. A double rectangular fish-tank was also found next to the wall on the north-west, which seems fairly ancient, although not recorded in any of the known plans. This fish-tank seems to have gathered the flow of water to the wall beds, but also perhaps the water from the upper terrace.

It cannot be excluded that it was the reserve which fed water to the fountains on the inside of the aviary. The discovery of the bases of the benches which ringed the fountain led to the placing of them in their original position, at 2,96 m from the edge of the basin. This position confirms beyond argument that these were conceived specifically to ring the tank, in that at this point the spaces between one bench and another are equal to their length (9 Genoese palms, = 2.23 m), creating a sophisticated play on positive-negative.

The bases of the benches are sculpted with zoomorphic and anthropomorphic features, depicting an eagle, lion and gryphons on the inside and Turk’s head or putto on the outside, with a distinction between corner elements and central ones.