Parco Ciani

There are several buildings within Ciani park: Villa Ciani, the Convention Centre, the dockyard and the Rino Tami Cantonal Library. Villa Ciani was designed by the architect Luigi Clerichetti in the first half of the 1840s. It was bought, together with its park, by Lugano City Council in 1912. Ciani Park is just a stone's throw away from the centre of Lugano on the banks of the Ceresio. It attracts many tourists who flock to admire what is considered to be one of the most beautiful parks in Switzerland.
This exceptional landscape is perfectly managed and maintained by the Municipal Administration. The park's 63.000 square metres are divided into two distinct areas: the first, adjacent to Villa Ciani, offers both Italian and English styles of garden design, embellished with wide flowerbeds and a collection of shrubs and trees from all over the world. The second part of the park extends from the dock to the Cassarate river and is more naturalistic than the first, composed of meandering pathways. The trees are native: oaks, limes, planes and maples. Rare and exotic tree species flourish in the conditions found along the paths which wind between statues, fountains, flowerbeds and blooms of every colour and species. The presence of different species of palms, exotic shrubs, roses, azaleas, magnolias and camellias shows how Mediterranean plants can flourish in this area. The trunks of the more valuable or rare trees are labelled to enable recognition by the curious or by passionate botanists.
Seasonal flowering is one of the park's principal attractions, when the colours are offset by the nuances of the lake and its landscape. Finally, deserves special mention the redevelopment of the river mouth Cassarate, directed by the landscape architect Sophie Agata Ambroise and completed in June 2014. Today the Foce of river Cassarate looks like an ideal place to walk and rest.