Historic villa and garden · 18th century · Negrar di Valpolicella, Veneto

Villa Rizzardi and the Garden of Pojega

Villa Rizzardi, also known as Villa Guerrieri Rizzardi, is a late-Baroque patrician villa in Negrar di Valpolicella in the province of Verona, surrounded by one of the finest surviving 18th-century Italian formal gardens in the Veneto, the Giardino di Pojega. Laid out between 1783 and 1796 to designs attributed to Luigi Trezza, the garden combines a bosco all’italiana with clipped yew hedges, a grass-tiered outdoor theatre (teatro di verzura), a coffee house, and an extended network of axial allées descending toward the vineyard estate. The property remains in the Guerrieri Rizzardi family and is open seasonally, integrating wine tourism with garden heritage visits.

At a glance

Type: Historic villa with formal Italian garden (giardino all’italiana)
Period: Garden designed 1783–1796; attributed to Luigi Trezza
Style: Late Baroque / Neoclassical Italian garden
Location: Pojega di Negrar, Negrar di Valpolicella, Province of Verona, Veneto, Italy
Coordinates: 45.5335° N, 10.9435° E

Overview

The Garden of Pojega is considered one of the rare intact examples of a 18th-century Veneto formal garden, a landscape type that was extensively modified or abandoned during the 19th and 20th centuries. The Guerrieri Rizzardi family’s stewardship has preserved the garden’s structure through two centuries, including its bosco — a dense woodland of yew, box, and ilex — and the extraordinary teatro di verzura, a grass amphitheatre carved from yew hedges for outdoor theatrical and musical performances. The surrounding vineyards produce Valpolicella DOC and Amarone della Valpolicella DOCG wines that are sold under the estate label.

History

The Rizzardi family acquired the Pojega estate in the 18th century and commissioned Luigi Trezza, a Veronese architect and theorist of landscape design, to transform the hillside property into a garden. Trezza’s design drew on the Italian garden tradition while incorporating Enlightenment ideas of natural order and theatrical space, producing a garden that was at once a pleasure ground, a symbol of landed authority, and a venue for cultural events. The family later merged with the Guerrieri line, which has managed the estate into the present. The garden survived the disruptions of Napoleon’s campaigns through the Veneto and the destruction of the two world wars, escaping the fate of many comparable properties.

What you see

Visitors enter through a gate flanked by Baroque statuary and proceed along a central axis that descends through compartments of clipped box and laurel to the teatro di verzura — a semicircular amphitheatre of green yew walls with a stage platform, capable of seating audiences for summer concerts. Lateral allées lead to a coffee house pavilion and viewpoints over the Valpolicella hills. The bosco portion of the garden provides shade and a contrast of wild texture against the geometric hedges. In the villa’s cellars, the estate winery operates tours and tastings of Valpolicella, Ripasso, and Amarone wines.

Cultural significance

The Giardino di Pojega is included in Italian heritage inventories of historic gardens and listed by the Regione Veneto as a garden of particular cultural interest. It serves as a reference site for garden historians studying the transition between Baroque formalism and Romantic naturalism in the Veneto at the end of the 18th century, and its teatro di verzura is one of fewer than a dozen intact grass theatres surviving in Italian gardens.

Practical information

Address: Pojega di Negrar, Via Pojega, 37024 Negrar di Valpolicella VR, Italy. The garden and winery are open seasonally — typically spring to autumn — for guided visits and wine tastings. Advance booking is recommended. Check the Guerrieri Rizzardi official website for current opening hours, visit formats, and event calendar.

Getting there

Negrar di Valpolicella is approximately 10 km north of Verona. By car, take the A22 Autostrada del Brennero to the Verona Nord exit, then follow signs toward Valpolicella and Negrar (approximately 15 minutes). From Verona, local bus services run to Negrar; the estate is a short taxi ride from the village centre. Verona Porta Nuova is the main railway station, served by high-speed and regional trains from Milan, Venice, and Bologna.

Sources & resources

Find it on the map

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Carlo Rizzardi purchased Villa Rizzardi with the Pojega estate in 1649, a possession with &quot;pieces of plowed and meadow land with vineyards, morari, olive trees and other fruit trees...&quot; strengthened in the following years with further acquisitions of land.



Since the sixteenth century, the Negrar area, fifteen kilometers from Verona, particularly favored by its proximity to the urban center and its optimal climatic exposure, was the subject of growing interest for city land investments. At the time, the habit of holidaying in a villa was not yet widespread and in the construction of country residences, priority was given to the rationality and functionality of the management center over the artistic beauty of the property.



It was Count Antonio Rizzardi who commissioned the Garden of Pojega to the architect Luigi Trezza who, for its construction, which took place between 1783 and 1796, was inspired by the gardens of the sixteenth-century Venetian tradition, in spite of the typically English canons in vogue at the time . At a time when the Italian garden was neglected to make way for the combination of lawn and woods, called the English garden, the Pojega garden, the last of its kind to be created in Italy, acquired a particular meaning.



The Pojega estate in Negrar has been the property of the Rizzardi counts since 1649, when it was purchased by Carlo Rizzardi, who expanded it with further acquisitions in the following years. It includes approximately twenty-five hectares of vineyards dedicated to the production of Guerrieri Rizzardi wines.
The importance of the complex is due to the extraordinary garden that Count Antonio Rizzardi (1742-1808) wanted to create, combining humanistic inspiration with a great sense of scenography and landscape, a triumph of perspective. He entrusted the design to Luigi Trezza (1752-1823), a Veronese exponent of Venetian neoclassical architecture, who managed to reconcile the spectacular and formal Italian garden with the romantic garden created to recreate a sophisticated natural environment.



It extends over an area of ??54 thousand square metres, partly on a slope and partly on flat ground, divided into three parallel routes which differ in terms of altitude, vegetation and relationship to the environment. The natural slopes of the land are enhanced with a semicircular appendage in which there is the &quot;green theatre&quot;, with seven rows of steps in box hedges, cypresses and niches in the hornbeam, to which a tribute to the perspective is added with the avenue of carpini and the neoclassical style with statues that recall the classical age. The theater faces west, to better exploit the sunset lights and on the stage, hornbeam hedges act as wings for the actors. The final route takes place in the romantic garden with a forest of black and white hornbeams, field maples, downy oaks, holm oaks and yews. In the undergrowth, among numerous palm trees, menacing pumas, dogs and stone lionesses emerge.



Places of interest nearby:


	Itineraries to discover villas and parish churches in Valpolicella,&nbsp;food and wine itineraries
	Since 6 November 2015, San Giorgio di Valpolicella has been included among the most beautiful villages in Italy.
	The Lessinia Regional Natural Park is an oasis established in 1990 to protect and enhance the nature and historical heritage of a vast area located north-northwest of Verona.
	Negrar is about 15 km from the center of Verona and about 25 km from Lake Garda

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Villa Rizzardi with the Pojega estate – Garden of Pojega