Semenzaio di San Sisto

Roma Capitale records that the story begins in the early 1800s, when Camille de Tournon was made prefect of Rome after the French occupation and had the idea of a pépinière, a nursery to raise the plants for Rome's new avenues and public parks, on the land of the monastery of San Sisto where enclosed Dominican nuns had lived since 1222. A watercourse entering Rome at Porta Metronia fed two water mills, the Mola di San Sisto Vecchio and the Molella, whose structures survive in part. When the French left in 1814 the papal government inherited 30,000 trees ready for transplanting. The nursery was restored in 1926 by the landscape architect Raffaele De Vico, who designed the iron and glass greenhouses and the Aranciera with its neoclassical façade.