Dai giardini dell’Etruria agli horti romani La nascita del giardino nell’Italia antica. 2016. 97 figs. 302 p. gr8vo. Paper bd. - In Italian.

The formation of the "garden" in the pre-Roman Italic world is a complex process, the origins of which date back to protohistory and to the transformations of the environment into a widespread humanized landscape; the ritual conditioning of human intervention on the territory, especially in the Etruscan religion, finds its fundamental pivot in the limitatio - the sacred division of the cosmos - which pervades sacred and civil architecture, and generates the "cutout", in the landscape, of sacred woods, reserved for the divinities who continue to govern there even when aesthetic and eurythmic wills are introduced. However, it will be other sacred gardens – the funeral ones – that will ferry the artificial green space from the public sphere to the private one, as a theater of family cults at the noble tombs. At the same time, the garden of the banquet and the Dionysian komos was also born, another artificial and private open space with religious values and the scene of ritualized activities, whose social value will make it a secular status symbol. The evolutionary process that we know will lead to the creation of the private "pleasure garden" has therefore already begun, to reach the pre-Roman public parks and the horti of Etruscan and Italic houses, and finally the Roman garden, which proves, at the end of the investigation historic, as the heir to a long Mediterranean and Italian tradition of sensitivity to the symbolic values of green spaces.