Villa Ghigi

About this audio guide

This guide to Villa Ghigi in Bologna starts behind the villa, where a man once kept enough birds to stock a small zoo, breeding doves and exotic pheasants in numerous aviaries with the same care he gave his university lectures. It follows Alessandro Ghigi, a zoology professor and later rector of the University of Bologna, from the villa his father bought in 1874 through his push to found Italy's first national park in the Abruzzo mountains. Look up at the huge Himalayan cedar his father planted over the lawn where those aviaries once stood.