Guastalla gardens, Renaissance urban park in Quadronno district, Milan, Italy.
Guastalla Gardens is an urban park in central Milan built around a baroque fish pond lined with pink granite steps and marble railings. Tall beeches, walnuts, magnolias, and chestnuts grow along the paths, forming a green enclosure between the surrounding streets.
The gardens were laid out in 1555 as part of a convent founded by a countess from the Guastalla family. Over the following centuries the site changed hands several times before it was opened to the public as a city park.
A small neoclassical temple and a chapel holding a 17th-century statue of Mary Magdalene stand among the trees and are easy to spot as you walk the paths. The park is used by locals as a place to sit and read, often on the benches near the pond.
The park sits in central Milan beside a major hospital and can be entered from several surrounding streets. It is open every day, and the layout of the paths makes it easy to cross through on foot when moving between different parts of the neighborhood.
The carp and red fish living in the baroque pond have been there since the 1700s, making this one of the longest-running fish populations in any city park in northern Italy. You can see them clearly from the granite steps around the water.
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