While many have heard of the botanical gardens built during the Italian Renaissance period in northern Italy towns such as Padua and Pisa, a small & less well-known medicinal garden in Salerno actually predates them.
The Minerva Garden in this southern Italian town traces its roots back to the 14C, when the medical writer & botanist Matthaeus Silvaticus decided to set up a small garden of simple medicine, attached to Salerno’s medical school, Europe’s oldest.
Silvaticus used the garden for experimental & educational purposes, and mentions it in his 650-page encyclopedia about medicating agents, Pandectarum Medicinae, completed around 1317. In Chapter 196 on the large-leaved Colocasia plant, he says “and I have it in my garden in Salerno, near a sizeable spring.”
The area on which the modern garden stands has been identified as the garden referred to by Silvaticus. The layout visitors see today is a restoration based on its appearance in the 17-18C when it was part of a noble residence, & includes several different levels. An interesting feature is its complex network of waterways, fountains & springs
In the central garden on the first level, the plants are divided into sections reflecting the “four elements”: Air, Earth, Fire & Water, which formed the basis of the “humors theory” developed by Greek physician Galen, who lived between 129-216 AD. The mix of pairs of elements form the four fundamental bodily qualities: hot, cold, dry & wet.
The theory, which Medieval therapeutic principles in Salerno were based on, supposes that the prevalence of one of the humors in an individual decides one of four personality types: the Sanguine (optimistic, leader-like, lovers of food) who are associated with the Air element & blood, the Choleric (thin, frail, bad-tempered) who are linked to Fire & yellow bile, the Phlegmatic (fat, sluggish, lazy & unintelligent), connected to Water & phlegm, & the Melancholic (analytical, quiet & sad), tied with Earth & black bile.
Based on this system, the human body is governed by the four humors & any imbalances in them creates pathological states. Illness, viewed as the excess of one humor over others, can be corrected by a medicine that is opposite to the nature of the overbearing humor. For this reason, plants are classified with the same criteria used for studying human humors. So some plants are hot & wet, some are dry & cold etc.
The grounds of the garden are marked to show which herbal sections help for ailments related to the various humors & their corresponding elements, here we have water & earth & the quality of their pair in the middle: cold.
Here is Aloe Vera, planted in the section between “Hot” & “Dry”
The area on which the modern garden stands has been identified as the garden referred to by Silvaticus. The layout visitors see today is a restoration based on its appearance in the 17-18C when it was part of a noble residence, & includes several different levels. An interesting feature is its complex network of waterways, fountains & springs
In the human body, the four elements are represented in the four humors of the organism: blood (air), yellow bile (fire), phlegm (water) & black bile (earth). Here’s a chart:
Based on this system, the human body is governed by the four humors & any imbalances in them creates pathological states. Illness, viewed as the excess of one humor over others, can be corrected by a medicine that is opposite to the nature of the overbearing humor. For this reason, plants are classified with the same criteria used for studying human humors. So some plants are hot & wet, some are dry & cold etc.
The grounds of the garden are marked to show which herbal sections help for ailments related to the various humors & their corresponding elements, here we have water & earth & the quality of their pair in the middle: cold.
You can wander up the steps to subsequent levels, where you pass more springs, waterways & lemon tree groves among the many types of therapeutic plants:
The lower garden is full of orange trees & there is a pond-like water feature with overgrowing plants on one side:
