Restoration of the gardens: open-air museums of nature and history
This essays shows how the restoration of a garden, in turn, the product of a historiography of restorations,
must interact with contemporary culture. The garden is the product of a continuous change, which
includes both transformations for changes in taste and restorations to preserve its image. However,
the garden, by its very nature, is a work that belongs to the contemporary world. This, both through
the most sophisticated conservation techniques of the palimpsest, and through the introduction of
new contemporary resources. Referring to the literature on the restoration of gardens, new issues are
now opening up, relating to the tools of archaeological investigation and virtual representation, that
can increase the understanding of the historical phases without necessarily proceeding to arbitrary
“restorations”. A theme that interacts with the tourist use of the gardens, real open-air museums. Each
garden is the result of a symbolic narration of the great theater of nature. So, it can be restored in the
virtual territories, through indoor and outdoor museum installations, as in many European gardens
it has been doing for some time. This allows to preserve as much as possible the palimpsest, without
having to destroy a historical phase rather than another.
