Qui è l’Inferno e quivi il Paradiso. Giardini, paradisi e paradossi nella letteratura inglese del Seicento

The nostalgia for Paradise, the wish to find in the earth, in nature, consolation to mortality has always been one of the mightiest aspirations of man. Through the analysis of the work of seventeenth-century poets, essayists, architects and theorists, this study investigates the attitude of English culture towards the natural world and surveys the contradictions, the ambiguities, and the paradoxes connected with the garden and its representation. The paradisal fascination of the New World, the millenaristic theories, the coexistence of the sacred and the profane, the new sensitivity towards plants and animals, the close link between agriculture and alchemy, the initiation rituals, the marvels of the aeolian and hydraulic wonders are some of the themes connected with the idea of garden analyzed in this study. The aesthetics of gardens, starting from order, crossing chaos and going back to order, seems to follow the very same course of birth-death-rebirth that takes place within a park: in the late Renaissance the art of gardens, concrete expression of the wish to recreate the unblemished world of the origins, plunges into the inferos of artifice and technology to retrieve in the following century, albeit only on the surface, the spontaneity and purity of primeval nature