This is surely the main park of Faenza, a green set of lungs par excellence. It is located on what was once called piazza d'armi (the name has survived in the tradition of Faenza), up until the early 1900’s used for military drills and then as a horse pasture until the end of the 1960’s.
In the early 1970’s the Municipality of Faenza restored the gardens with the precious collaboration, from a fauna and botanic point of view, of Roberto Bucci, the industrialist from Faenza to which the park is dedicated and the naturalist garden nursery keeper Cesare Gallegati.
The elements that characterise this park are its remarkable size (over 8 hectares, which is not little for those times), the richness of the decorative arboreal and shrub plants and the presence of ponds. Even with its prevalence of exotic plants – a clear indication of the fashion of the 1960’s – the autochthonous species and in some points (for example the dense groups of white beech on the northern side or the micro oak bushes in the centre) reveals pioneer intuitions that can be attributed to the naturalist Gallegati. The beauty of the groups of plants – mainly holm oak on the western side of the hill and ginkgo biloba and Oriental sweet gum with their autumnal colours on the eastern side – is enhanced by the large lawn extension. Another dominating element is the water of two ponds joined together by a small stream, islands and bridges. The fauna present is made up of various types of water birds, with quite interesting species such as the Pintail duck and the shelduck. Of even more importance is the wild bird fauna with species that are not easily seen – tits, blackcaps, gold crests, fire crests and redstarts – but widely present in the park even with their nests.
There are currently 1580 plants in the park (with slight variation to this number), of which 1000 are tall trees, whilst the others are shrubs.