Giardini della Guastalla

This guide to Giardini della Guastalla in Milan opens with Ludovica Torelli, a twenty-nine-year-old widowed countess who arrived in Milan in fifteen fifty five stripped of her title, and her decision to pour her fortune into a school for poor noble daughters rather than remarry. It follows her architect Pellegrino Tibaldi's formal Italian garden and the Baroque fishpond at its western end, edged in pink Baveno granite. Listen for the small seventeenth-century shrine sheltering a terracotta Mary Magdalene along the paths.