On 29 April 2025 at 4 p.m., the Opera della Primaziale Pisana will present the restoration of the Limonaia Garden of the Archbishop's Palace in Pisa.
After the institutional greetings of Andrea Maestrelli (President of OPA), the Archbishop of Pisa Giovanni Paolo Benotto and Michele Conti (Mayor of Pisa) and a technical and historical presentation in the Auditorium of the Opera della Primaziale Pisana, the Inauguration Ceremony will take place in the Garden at 4.45 p.m., with a musical intervention by the Choir of Pisa Cathedral.
Participation is free and open to all those interested.
The restoration recalls the eighteenth-century layout that can be clearly read in the project submitted by engineer Stefano Piazzini in 1787 and which, with a few minor variations, was used at the time. The garden, designed according to the Italian model, was in fact divided into nine gravel-covered avenues and twelve flowerbeds filled with earth from the Bagni di San Giuliano, on the edges of which were placed one hundred and twenty square stone bases on which terracotta vases for citrus fruits rested.
The Giardino della Limonaia, the citrus fruit shed where the plants were kept from November to April, was built at the end of the 18th century at the behest of Archbishop Angelo Franceschi (1778-1806), within the large garden adjoining the palace and connected to the latter's south façade by a flyover, both of which were present in the 15th-century layout.
The garden consists of a large circular basin with a marble frame and two splendid aediculae decorated with geometric floral and animal motifs using different materials such as shells, fossils, sponges, sea niches and coloured stones.
In the decades following the 19th century, only routine maintenance work and regular monthly payments were recorded for the gardener and his helper and for the purchase of pots, plants and gardening tools. Between 1906 and 1907, Archbishop Cardinal Pietro Maffi offered the premises of the Limonaia to the Antoni brothers to set up a first workshop to build their monoplane, which in 1912 completed the Pisa-Corsica flight. After this experience, there are no records of use of the Limonaia and its garden, which underwent a gradual degradation until the bombings of the Second World War that seriously damaged the roofs of the buildings, leaving the perimeter walls almost intact.
Since 2001, the Limonaia has been the headquarters of the Pisa Diocesan Historical Archive, which preserves - in addition to the documentation resulting from the activities carried out by the bishopric - numerous documented complexes produced by various ecclesiastical bodies of the diocese.
Today's intervention aimed at restoring the Limonaia Garden to the prestige and importance it already had at the end of the 18th century.
