Description
The Orto Botanico di Torino is the University's botanical garden, on the left bank of the Po, near the Valentino park. It is a place of study for the University, open to visitors too, with greenhouses, a miniature woodland, a corner of plants from the Bible and a braille trail with plants to touch.
The trail for the visually impaired is one of its most original features: alongside living plants that you can touch and feel in various ways there are braille labels, also designed for the partially sighted.
The Boschetto is a small woodland of the kind found in the Po plain, which began around 1840. Also worth seeing are the greenhouses and the corner of plants mentioned in the Bible. The cultivated species reached, in the 18th century, 4,500.
The real star is a work of paper: the Iconographia Taurinensis, 64 volumes with 7,470 plates in pencil and watercolor painted between 1752 and 1868 by four painter-botanists, a portrait of the plants grown in the garden.
Since 1729 the Regio Orto Botanico has been one of the places where Turin has cultivated science. It was established in 1729, when Victor Amadeus II reorganized the university and created the chair of botany. The king's old garden was chosen, next to the Castello del Valentino, on the banks of the Po.
At first the focus was mostly on medicinal plants. Under the direction of Giuseppe Bartolomeo Caccia the cultivated species reached 317; with Vitaliano Donati, in 1762, there were about 1,200, gathered on journeys through Piedmont.
With Carlo Allioni, one of the great botanists of the 18th century, who directed it from 1762, the garden reached 4,500 species. Allioni wrote the Flora Pedemontana and began drying the cultivated plants, the basis of today's herbarium.
In 1801 the directorship passed to Giovanni Battista Balbis, who in thirteen years added 1,900 species and kept up relations with botanists and scientific institutions all over Europe. Thanks to the interest of the French general Menou, administrator of the Po department, help arrived for new species and structures.
The trail for the visually impaired is one of its most original features: alongside living plants that you can touch and feel in various ways there are braille labels, also designed for the partially sighted.
The Boschetto is a small woodland of the kind found in the Po plain, which began around 1840. Also worth seeing are the greenhouses and the corner of plants mentioned in the Bible. The cultivated species reached, in the 18th century, 4,500.
The real star is a work of paper: the Iconographia Taurinensis, 64 volumes with 7,470 plates in pencil and watercolor painted between 1752 and 1868 by four painter-botanists, a portrait of the plants grown in the garden.
Since 1729 the Regio Orto Botanico has been one of the places where Turin has cultivated science. It was established in 1729, when Victor Amadeus II reorganized the university and created the chair of botany. The king's old garden was chosen, next to the Castello del Valentino, on the banks of the Po.
At first the focus was mostly on medicinal plants. Under the direction of Giuseppe Bartolomeo Caccia the cultivated species reached 317; with Vitaliano Donati, in 1762, there were about 1,200, gathered on journeys through Piedmont.
With Carlo Allioni, one of the great botanists of the 18th century, who directed it from 1762, the garden reached 4,500 species. Allioni wrote the Flora Pedemontana and began drying the cultivated plants, the basis of today's herbarium.
In 1801 the directorship passed to Giovanni Battista Balbis, who in thirteen years added 1,900 species and kept up relations with botanists and scientific institutions all over Europe. Thanks to the interest of the French general Menou, administrator of the Po department, help arrived for new species and structures.