Imperial Extravagances.The Park of Miramare as a Manifesto of the New Exotic

The essay discusses the Miramare park, built in Trieste, Italy, from 1856 by the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Habsburg (1832-67). It focuses on the ways the spatial and compositional complexity of the park’s design reflected nineteenth-century European models in garden art, which were characterized by a botanical and stylistic variety expressed in a mixture of regular and irregular design, a contamination of classical taste, picturesque tradition and the curiosity for exotic botanical species.