Giardini Papadopoli

This guide to the Giardini Papadopoli in Venice starts with stage designer Francesco Bagnara, hired in eighteen thirty-four by Countess Teresa Mosconi to turn a stripped former convent site into a romantic garden of winding paths. You'll hear how later owners, the Papadopoli brothers, added a terrace over the Grand Canal and an aviary stocked with silver parrots and pheasants, making it the place fashionable Venice came to be seen. Look for the older trees among the plantings, cypress, cedar and elm, as you walk the paths today.