For over a century, a Sunday stroll through Bologna’s Giardini Margherita park has been a longstanding tradition for practically every Bolognese. Just a short walk from the old city center, this large public park is part of most people’s childhood memories, recalling picnics on the grass on sunny days in spring and snowball fights on cold winter mornings. Modeled along the lines of a Romantic English landscape and inaugurated in 1879 with the name “Queen Margherita Promenade”, its 26 ha are still today the old city’s main green area. The wide concentric avenues – originally designed to allow horse-drawn carriages – are now thronged by pedestrians and bikers.
A listed landscape, the park has many noteworthy features, each with a story to tell. There is an artificial lake with rocky selenite banks where people could once go boating or ice-skating, depending on the season; the Art Nouveau building by Edoardo Collamarini; and even, from 1938 until its closure in the 1970s, an area with two caged lions. The Etruscan travertine tomb found during the construction of the park is, however, still there, as is a short, uncovered segment of the underground Savena canal, one of Bologna’s historic waterways. The old greenhouses still stand, reopened a decade ago as a cultural, art, and innovation center after extensive refurbishing when the park’s former custodian’s cottage was also renovated and turned into the headquarters of the Kilowatt cultural association.
The most recent – and unusual – adaptive reuse project involves the building housing the park’s former electrical distribution substation. Built in the 1930s and decommissioned in the 1980s, its characteristic 12-m-high central tower gives it a somewhat ecclesiastic appearance. Owned by the city, the volume has an interior surface area of 185 sq. m. It too, is a listed building, coming within the general artistic heritage...
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