The Vergil Garden in Naples

The Parco Virgiliano a Piedigrotta, Naples, has a “Virgil Garden”—a terraced park that feature the many plants mentioned in the poet’s works, all carefully labeled with botanical detail and a pertinent hexameter excerpt. This paper examines this site through ten frames, to understand how Virgilian vegetation is redeployed for homage, honour, and horticulture. The ten frames perceive the garden

(i) as a park, with beautiful views of the Amalfi coast and Mt. Vesuvius, purporting to offer a connection with nature and elevating the site within the city’s long history;

(ii) as a living reference work, providing a research resource for the curious and affirming the implicit value both of the poet and of his works for the Neapolitans;

(iii) as an act of colonization, demonstrating human command of the land over centuries and the reframing of its purpose for educational and edificational use;

(iv) as an act of canonization, drawing implicit parallels with the parallel practice of Shakespeare Gardens, an antecedent cultural activity exalting the Bard as a deployer of layered vegetal reference, and thereby providing an opportunity for American colleges to demonstrate their devotion to the poet by funding enhancements to the park;

(v) as an act of civilization, taming, domesticating, retransplanting, and cataloguing vegetation from across the Mediterranean into a sanitized and easily consumed format;

(vi) as an engineering marvel, the Crypta Neapolitana, a Roman tunnel (contemporary with Virgil) connecting Naples to Pozzuoli and the Phlegrean Fields, around which legends of Virgilian miracles developed in the medieval period;

(vii) as a site of pilgrimage for Virgil, as the supposed site of the poet’s tomb, affirming Naples as a central part of the Augustan poetic legacy and the poet as a wide-ranging and thoughtful horticulturalist;

(viii) as a site of pilgrimage for Giacomo Liopardi, the 19th c. Italian poet for whom there is also a memorial on the site, with the concomitant association of Leopardi with Virgil;

(ix) as a war memorial, implicitly associating the Virgilian account of foundation of Rome with the (problematic) sacrifices made by Italian soldiers in defense of their homeland;

(x) and finally, as a place of poetic pietas, supposedly owned first by the Latin epic poet, Silius Italicus.

Devotion to the poet and a city’s understandable pride in its successful citizen do not in themselves justify the creation of a Virgil Garden. There is no antecedent scholarship on the Garden, and almost nothing on Shakespeare Gardens (though see Watson 2015). By considering the Parco Virgiliano a Piedigrotta through these ten frames, it is possible to create a gallery view, revealing for the first time the extent to which nature, cultivation, and poetic prestige combine to create a deep and layered site which reveals a new aspect of the green Virgil. The result is a cultivated space, in which the imagined life of the poet assumes new meaning for park visitors, through its bizarre deployment of literary hegemony which has tamed and transformed the physical landscape.