Botanical garden

Worldwide there are about 1.400 botanical gardens and arboreta with over 100 million visitors every year. A lot are in Europe and more than thirty, including university botanical gardens and not, are in Italy.

Italy boasts a historic first in terms of botanical gardens: the first structures of this type, no longer exist today, were founded in Italy in the thirteenth century in Rome, in the Vatican, and in the fourteenth century in Salerno.

These gardens were meant to monstrances of plants used for medical purposes, like the university botanical gardens, still exist, made in Padua, Pisa and Florence in the sixteenth century. Most of the Italian botanical gardens were founded in the second half of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Thanks to the enormous development of systematic plant, following the introduction of Linnaean nomenclature, botanical gardens became places of observation, as well as sites of experimentation and acclimatization of new species. Some gardens are carrying out reconstruction of environments for visitors to better understand the various adaptations of plants and ecosystem functioning, at least for the plant component.

The Botanical Garden of Catania, is directed by the Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Science of the University of Catania, as the others it tries to play its role in contemporary society to sensitize the public, that could be composed by botany lovers or not, about issues related to environmental protection.

In the center of the city, via Etnea 397, there’s the Botanical Gardens, historic garden of the city, is now the destination of many visitors who can enjoy, in every month of the year, valuable botanical collections such as Palms(about 50 species), Succulents (2,000 species) and Wild plants in Sicily.

The garden was founded in 1858 by Benedictine monaco Francesco Tornabene, it covers an area of 16.000 square meters and includes the General Garden (where are a lot of exotic plants) and the Sicilian Garden (for cultivation of wild species from Sicily).

During the spring and summer the Garden reserves to its visitors evocative opening night hosting concerts and shows, that they are framed by the elegant neo-classical colonnade overlooking the garden.

Visitors are obliged to show relevant documentation to prove that they belong to a particular class of contribution.
For school groups or groups of over 20 people it is necessary to book the visit: 095 6139910.

The site is temporarily closed. For more information contact 0957102767 or 3349242464.