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Cura: care · cure · tending
A Certosa garden as the spatial form of human care
2026
Parco della Certosa, Collegno (Turin), Italy
Healing Garden competition - Honourable Mention
Organiser: Non-a, the Municipality of Collegno, Sleeping Beauty
Site: 2.56 ha
Budget: 60.000€
Care, made spatial
In the Roman myth recorded by Hyginus, Care (Cura) shapes the first human from river clay. Jupiter lends the breath, Earth the body, and Care is granted to hold the creature for as long as it lives: Cura teneat, quamdiu vixerit.
The Certosa di Collegno, west of Turin, has lived each sense of the word. Its Carthusian monks each tended a walled hortus as a spiritual discipline; the Royal Asylum that followed turned care into cure, and tending into forced labour; after Basaglia and Law 180, the compound reopened to the city and today hosts Orto che Cura, its own “garden that cares.”
Cura takes the last open land of the ensemble, 2.56 hectares, and makes it the place where care, cure and tending meet again. A revived east-west axis crosses a field of circular chambers, from dense wood to open meadow, held in a mown-meadow matrix. A single walk threads them, staging a twelve-step recovery journey from disorientation to return.
The garden takes its form from maintenance over time, is planted with the community that will tend it.