Rooftop Gardens: The Most Beautiful in Italy

Fruit trees and vegetables: an aesthetic and environmental function. In Milan, they're also present in public housing.

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- gardens on roofs They are an important part of cities that are changing as a function of a reduction in pollution, carbon dioxide emissions and even urban aesthetics.
- gardens on roofs, also depending on the available space, have a double typology of cultivations. On the one hand vegetables and vegetables, on the other side fruit trees. In both cases thegarden on roofs allows the absorption of emissions, creates a pleasant cool area, allows the production of zero kilometer products. In Italy they gardens on roofs They are increasing, but which are the most beautiful?

Hanging Garden on Via Tortona

The garden on the roofs of the houses It cannot become a new status symbol for the wealthy and fortunate. Nor can it be reduced to a sort of local aesthetic to market homes at the high end of the market, the one least affected by the Great Depression. If the garden is a strategic urban planning choice, as well as a way to improve the aesthetics of places and attract segments of the population to urban agriculture, it must even more so be extended to include non-luxury homes.

A beautiful example that goes in this direction can be found in Milan, it is thethe hanging garden in the houses of Via Tortona which is now being re-proposed, for a total surface area of ​​3.500 square meters, on the roofs of the 400 public housing units of Via Russoli, a peripheral neighborhood of Milan, with a very bad reputation in terms of livability and safety.

Salads, zucchini, potatoes, herbsBut also apricot and peach trees. The project, carried out by the association Cultivating the city, formed by a few tenants and chaired by architect Tiziana Monterisi, is truly a dream come true. Needless to say, the list of advantages: more beautiful buildings and houses, inhabitants who socialize, the advancing green and the pollution that is going backwardsCitizens regaining control of spaces devoured by concrete. These are all things we know, and for which this site has long fought.

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Vegetable gardens on the roofs of council houses

Furthermore, the suburbs can and must change, following the path indicated years ago by Renzo Piano: no demolitions, much less a barrage of new concrete. No, just micro-urban surgery, interventions carried out one by one, on a single canvas, like embroidery. Regenerated spaces, with the essential lever of greenery. The future city passes through here, which cannot be the only one smart and functional, for the wealthy and for the business community. But it must truly be of everyone and for everyone.

Fortunately, the initiative in Via Tortona has spread over time to other neighbourhoods, reaching, thanks to some pensioners, even the Barona district, where they take care of the plants. And other urban gardens will grow on the roofs of the Aler public housing. A large savings for those who grow but also for the less fortunate families of the neighborhood, to whom they are donated fruits and veg unconsumed.

Rooftop Gardens in Turin

Turin is no exception, where the “OrtiAlti” project was born to redevelop the city by involving the inhabitants, experimenting with practices of horticulture Urban planning and regeneration of underutilized areas. The first "high garden" was created on the roof of the 999 architecture studio. Projects, to name a few, include the garden above the Ozanam Foundries in a peripheral, industrial area of ​​Turin, and the rooftop garden at Via Baltea 3, a former printing house.

Rooftop Garden of Palazzo Pucci in Florence

A magnificent synergistic vegetable garden where onions, lettuce, beets, cabbage, zucchini, thyme, rare flowers, and plants virtually impossible to find elsewhere are grown. The view is breathtaking, as the garden overlooks Brunelleschi's dome. Designed by Marquis Giannozzo Pucci, the vegetable garden Palazzo Pucci combines ancient knowledge with modernity and innovation.

Vegetable garden on the roofs of Palermo

Palermo also boasts several rooftop gardens thanks to the Orto Capovolto project, born in 2015 to contribute to creating a large widespread vegetable garden In the Sicilian city. The cooperative helps grow vegetable gardens everywhere: on terraces, rooftops, balconies, and in forgotten corners of the city, both to encourage self-production and as educational and social integration tools.

It all began in 2013 when Angelica, who founded the cooperative with Giorgio, suggested to a client that they create a vegetable garden on the roof of their home. The idea was a huge success.

(Source images: SuperStudio Group Facebook Page)

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