Orto Botanico

Bologna's botanical gardens were initiated in 1568 in the Ferrerio college by the naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi. It was initially called the Orto dei Simplici because you will find simple medicines cultivated here. It was enlarged and improved for the last time in the 19th Century by the Botanist Antonio Bortoloni. Today it contains another 5000 species of vegetation distributed over an area of 20,000 meters square. There are tropical plants, gimnosperms, mediterranean plants, medicinal plants etc. and annexed to the gardens is the famous Herbarium, reputedly the largest in Europe because of its hundreds of thousands of dried plants catalogued in a computer database.