Openfabric

Amadei Garden Street transforms a peripheral street in Mantua into a continuous linear park, redefining an ordinary roadway as a shared public landscape. Traffic calming, selective depaving, and planting work together to shift the street’s identity from infrastructure to place.

Today, Via Amadei unfolds as a dense, layered landscape crossed by a sinuous path, where slow-moving cars coexist with a space that feels closer to a public garden than an urban road. Sidewalks, crossings, and green areas merge into a porous ground that softens the separation between movement and inhabitation.

The project’s landscape strategy originates from close observation of the private gardens lining the street—small fenced plots rich in biodiversity and shaped by everyday care. Their plant species are extended into the public realm, creating a cosmopolitan planting palette of over fifty species from five continents that reflects the cultural diversity of the neighborhood.

By reducing asphalt by 45%, space is reclaimed for soil and vegetation, improving microclimatic comfort, strengthening ecological resilience, and transforming the street into a true urban ecological corridor—one that blurs the boundary between private and public and fosters a renewed sense of belonging.