Viktor Wretström

Scholarship at the Swedish Institute in Rome

“The first gardens were not made, but discovered.” So begins Christopher Thackers The History of Gardens (1979) in his treatise on the first woody and grassy areas that we humans would soon consider as gardens, parks, or sacred groves. Although the gardens that Thacker initially discusses with this sentence are those untended gardens of the elusive nymphs, the bountiful flower goddess Flora or the ever-fruitful orchard of the Hesperides, the sentence rings equally true to all the tended parks that would follow in the footsteps of these mythological spaces. These real places were all sprung from a sense of discovered beauty to quickly become a place of human control, walled limitations and man-made constructions.

In my PhD project Urban Gardens: A Public Space for Private Activities I will study both these mythological places, and their effect on the culture they exited within, and the tended parks that followed in their footsteps. Specifically, as the title of the project alludes to, I focus on urban gardens and parks and how they functioned as a middling area between public elements and private activities within the urban landscape. These perspectives on gardens will be pursued á longue durée, focusing on the continuity, the changing functions, and accessibility of urban gardens from antiquity to the early modern period. A multitude of varied urban landscapes will serve as cases for this project, but few such landscapes can exceed the historical continuity existing in Rome when it comes to urban gardens. The urban gardens and parks of Rome enable comparisons with how other urban landscapes of antiquity, such as Constantinople (Istanbul), Pergamon (Izmir), and Athens, developed and how urban landscapes that grew to prominence at later periods, such as those in Aachen, Florence, Paris, London, Copenhagen, Tunis, or even Boston were established.