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Villa Floridiana is a building of historical and artistic interest in Naples, Vomero area, and inside a park which goes by the same name. The villa was part of a group of buildings used as royal residences by the Bourbon family and it was constructed in 1819 at the behest of Ferdinand IV of Bourbon. It has hosted since 1927 the National Museum of Pottery Duca di Martina. The villa was built according to the neoclassical style and the wide park is in romantic style and was designed by Niccolini with numerous artificial ruins, statues and architectural elements such as the Ionic Temple, the puppet show of the Verzura, enclosures and caves and a small lake with caretta turtles. The park was entrusted in 1895 to the royal gardener Friedrich Dehnhardt who decorated it with more than 150 species of plants like holm oaks, pines, plane trees, palms, boxwoods and a rich collection of camelias. It was modified again between 1872 and 1880: holm oaks’ flowerbeds and English meadows were put in the wide elliptic parterre with a central fountain and statues on the southern part of the villa; the great entrance alley was interrupted with a rectilinear boulevard which hides the villa till its end. Nowadays, the park is characterised by a system of sinuous path ways and a collection of trees, because of the unfavourable historic events.

THE PLANTS
Plane trees, araucarias and cedar trees are in the surrounding areas of the villa, which represented an innovation at the time of the park opening for all Europe. The most interesting plants are camelias, palms of different species, a Grevillea robusra and a specimen of Ginkgo biloba. The museum Duca di Martina hosts one of the major Italian collections of decorative arts and it includes more than 7000 works of occidental and oriental manufacture dating back to the 12^th and 19^th centuries.

This post is also available in: Italiano (Italian)