Vatican Gardens

The gardens go back to 1279 and the pontificate of Nicholas III, 1277 to 1280, who moved the papal residence from the Lateran to the Vatican and had a pomerium, a pratellum and a viridarium planted inside his new walls on Mons Saccorum; the Governorate records that the stone inscription of this planting is now on the Capitol. A Belvedere palace of delights followed under Innocent VIII, 1484 to 1492, and Bramante's Belvedere courtyard under Julius II. Pirro Ligorio, 1512 or 1513 to 1583, built the Casina with its loggia for Pius IV by 1565. Pius V added exotic and rare plants collected by the botanist Michele Mercati and the Bolognese scholar Ulisse Aldrovandi, and Mercati laid out the geometric flowerbeds. The restoration of Trajan's aqueduct in the early seventeenth century allowed the fountains to run. Napoleon's troops plundered much of the gardens at the end of the eighteenth century, and Gregory XVI, 1831 to 1846, commissioned a renovation that Gaetano Moroni described in his Dizionario di erudizione storico-ecclesiastica, 1840 to 1861. Among the trees are nineteenth-century sculptures: a Saint Peter in chains by Maria Luisa Amalia Dupre, 1842 to 1928, given in 1887, and a bronze Saint Alpino stopping Attila by Jean Ernest Boutellier, 1851 to 1916, given in 1887 and 1888. After 1929 the architect Giuseppe Momo, 1875 to 1940, with the botanist Giovanni Nicolini, laid out the present gardens over four years.