The Bellini garden

The Bellini garden (called according to the local Catania dialect “a villa”) is a large green area dating back to the eighteenth century that belonged to Prince Ignazio Paternò Castello, who, from the very beginning, worked to adorn it with hedges, statues and fountains with gushing the goal of creating pleasant water features.

In 1854 the garden was sold by the heirs of Prince Paternò Castello to the municipality of Catania who, with the collaboration of the Catania architect Landolina, started a redevelopment project for the entire area, assimilating the numerous gardens adjacent to it in order to make the larger and more spacious garden. The area of the entire garden occupies seventy-two thousand square meters of space and the entrance on via Etnea is characterized by the presence of numerous stairways adorned with small flower beds that lead to a large fountain in the center of the square in which there are surrounded by white swans.

A peculiar feature of the two hills that dominate the garden is the calendar that shows the updated date. The substrate characterizing the garden is of a sedimentary type made up of blue marly clays partly covered by backfill, while the bioclimate observed is of the thermo-Mediterranean-subhumid type with a constant temperature of about eighteen degrees.

On the side that runs along via Salvatore Tomaselli you can see a wrought iron cloister, which, until the sixties, was used for public debates, meetings and musical concerts, while in the opposite area it could be observed until the end of the nineties a wooden cloister, used as a library, donated by the Chinese emperor.

The floristic presence is abundant and also includes subtropical species that have acclimatized well to the type of environment that the city offers as well as a varied number of palms, plane trees, ficus magnolia, pines and evergreen trees. Currently the Bellini garden has been accredited as a natural park and in the last twenty years it has been mainly used as a place reserved for musical concerts, cultural and religious events.