Italian Garden

With the dedication of a bust of the poet Virgil, the Italian Cultural Garden was opened on October 12, 1930 before a crowd of 3000 local Italians celebrating Columbus Day and the 2000th anniversary of Virgil’s birth. Over the next decade, the Italian Garden Delegation added sculpture, as well as designed and constructed the formally landscapes space. On September 14, 1941, the Italian Cultural Garden was officially dedicated. It costs over $100,000 to build the garden, with the city contributing approximately $18,000 and the Federal Government, in W.P.A. funds, contributing over $94,000 to the cost.

Designed formally, the two-level garden was, to borrow Clare Lederer’s phrasing, “grandly conceived in the spirit of the Italian Renaissance.”

The upper level of the garden has a large circular marble fountain, a stone parapet, and a bronze bust of the poet Virgil. Mounted on a stone column taken from the ancient Roman forum, this sculpture was a gift from an Italian government headed by Mussolini. The upper level also includes a block of stone hewn from the side of Monte Grappa in northern Italy, in honor of the many northern Ohio members of the 332nd Regiment of Infantry, who fought on Italian soil during World War I. There is also a table that recalls the flight of Italian General Balbo from Rome to Cleveland in 1933.

The lower level is accessible from above by two curved staircases that flank a semicircular, brick-paved court. Set into a thirty-foot, decorated retaining wall is a double shell fountain. Six medallions of carved stone adorn the wall and represent six Italian cultural figures: Giotto (1267-1337), a Florentine artist; Michelangelo (1475-1564); Petrarch (1304-1374), a poet and humanist; Verdi (1813-1901), an operatic composer; Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519); and Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), known for inventing the radio.