Description
The Levico Terme Park is the most important historical park in the Province of Trento and was created at the beginning of the 20th century to a design by the German landscape gardener Georg Ziehl (1873- 1953), when Levico Terme, a well-known spa resort, was a favourite holiday destination of the Austro-Hungarian nobility, who appreciated the benefits of the arsenic-ferruginous mineral waters that still flow upstream from the town of Levico Terme.
The history of the spa park is closely related to the idea of the spa town and began in 1898, with the acquisition by Giulio Adriano Pollacseck, director of the Levico-Vetriolo Heilquellen Society, of an 'arable land with vines and mulberry trees of approximately 120,000 metres, at the agreed and accepted price of 100,000 florins' in the Caodigne area. The aim was to create a 'spa resort' consisting of a large establishment-hotel set in the middle of a large park.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Nuremberg gardener Georg Ziehl was commissioned to design the park, which was to comply with the canons of 19th-century fashion. Thus a large spa garden was created, equipped with a network of promenades for the delight of the guests of the large spa hotel built in record time and opened in 1905.
The main axis of the park starts from the Levico railway station, connected in direct relation to the spa complex by an avenue lined with centuries-old beech trees, arriving at the main entrance to the park and from there to the Grand Hotel through a large visual telescope.
The planting of the monumental trees that can still be admired today dates back to that time.
Villa Paradiso, the graceful Art Nouveau building located in the central position of the park, was the gardener's residence.
On the other hand, the beech and other broadleaf trees, added to the park after the war by the then director Alcide Saltori, who was the first to insert flower beds in the glades that had once been used for heliotherapy, date from the post-war period.
Lastly, the Caucasus firs that border some of the main avenues are of more recent planting.
