BOTANICAL ROME AND NATURAL MEDICINE

Nature, Knowledge, Wellbeing

Rome hides an almost invisible green world: convent gardens behind cloister walls, apothecaries fragrant with lemon balm and lavender, copper stills boiling herbs for the sick. This itinerary takes the visitor into that world in six stops and four kilometres. It begins at the Botanical Garden on the Janiculum — one of the most beautiful in Italy, with an entire section of medieval medicinal plants still cultivated — and descends through Trastevere to the seventeenth-century apothecary of the Discalced Carmelites: a convent pharmacy that has survived almost intact, with its majolica jars on the shelves and its copper alembics still in place. It crosses the Tiber to the Hospital of Santo Spirito, the oldest in Europe, with its eighteenth-century pharmacy and handwritten prescription books. It climbs back toward the historic centre, to the Biblioteca Angelica and the Collegio Romano, where the Jesuits collected exotic plants from their missions in Asia and the Americas. It arrives finally at the Accademia dei Lincei, where Federico Cesi published the largest Mexican herbarium of the seventeenth century — three thousand plants, catalogued in Mexico and printed in Rome.