The project for the garden was entrusted to Luigi Trezza in 1783. He was one of the greatest figures in neoclassical architecture in Verona and the Veneto region in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The project was commissioned by Antonio Rizzardi, who had inherited a passion for ‘green’ architecture from his ancestors.

Built between 1783 and 1796, the garden is one of the last examples in Veneto of an arrangement in the formal Italian style, although not without some concessions to the ‘picturesque’ taste that the new Romantic trend was beginning to introduce at the time.

The plan shows how the garden, installed on a large (54,000 m2) irregular plot, is organized into three parallel paths at different heights and with different vegetation and relationships with the environment. They are arranged perpendicular to the slope of the valley and crossed by a fourth lane marked by century-old cypresses rising up to a ‘belvedere’. Four of the architect’s drawings of the original project remain and are stored in the Civic Library of Verona.