Public property, open to the public
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The Gonzaga Bosco della Fontana is located on Highway 236, in the direction towards the town of Marmirolo, in the Mincio National Park and in the vast area immediately north of Mantua where the views are on cultivated land and irrigated meadows, dotted with many interesting ancient courts and villas built between the 18th and 19th centuries. The nature reserve, managed by the National Forestry Corps, is an area of outstanding natural beauty of the utmost importance, due to its rare and precious fragment of lowland deciduous hornbeam and oak trees, that once extended across most of the Padano-Venetian plain and which, in the Gonzaga era, had an expansion of approximately two thousand hectares, connecting the villages of Goito, Soave and Marmirolo. Today the forest occupies 233 hectares and has circular tree formations within, connected by radial tree-lined avenues following the design that dates back to the mid- 18th century. One can still find the unique building, commissioned in the late 17th century by Duke Vincenzo I Gonzaga, in the centre, created by Giuseppe Dattaro from Cremona and completed by Anton Maria Viani. It was a place used for entertainment and enjoyment; the building was built on a rectangular plan with circular towers at each corner and a large tripartite central loggia surmounted by a gable that dominates the facade. The palace, surrounded by a moat conceived as a pond, was directly connected to a garden that was placed “opposite the palace with marble staircases, marble balusters and railings, and a fountain in the centre of the garden, that was all in order, with pergolas, flowers, paths and several types of fruit”. All that remains today on the large grounds, are the remnants of a central column and the stone quatrefoil basin of the fountain, adorned with statues of nautical gods and built over a natural spring, providing a name for the building and forest.
(From C. Bonora Previdi, Il giardino della Palazzina di caccia del Bosco della Fontana, in I giardini dei Gonzaga 2018, pp. 361-364)
