Top of the World
Parco Botanico di San Liberato After ten long years of hard-working devotion and creative effort, incessantly engaged in constant interaction with nature and the world of dreams, Count Donato Sanminiatelli, his wife Maria Odescalchi and the great landscape architect Russel Page gave life to a dream to be presented to others. It was the spring of 1964 when Page first set eyes on this location of breath-taking beauty: ''I don't know of any other garden capable of emanating the magic San Liberato does'' he said and accepted, in all ''humility'' and with great enthusiasm, the task of playing up and expanding the beauty of this small magnificent heaven. A real botanical park that contains Canadian maples, Japanese cherries, Spanish firs, liquidambar and Persian perrotias, camphor and tulip trees as well as wild nyssas which in autumn seem to be ablaze. A part of the garden is devoted to acidophil plants where it is possible to admire a sizeable collection of camellias that well harmonize with the black bamboo, the choysies and the rhododendrons. San Liberato is first and foremost a Romanesque church of incomparable beauty, standing in a wood of secular chestnut trees that borders on the park. San Liberato is also a rose-garden, or better, a gallery of roses, whose delicately coloured profusion is momentarily interrupted by a little stone fountain, the breeding-place and haunt of water-lilies and frogs.
