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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.

Cura’s healing garden concept: From the Carthusian ordering and sacred garden tradition to a garden as a common and a resourcing ground

A recovery journey in twelve steps

The walk is built on four bodies of evidence, read one over the next:

Mental recovery, through connectedness, hope, identity, meaning and empowerment (the CHIME framework, Leamy et al.);
Occupation, as doing, being, becoming and belonging (Wilcock);
Supportive space, offering control, movement, social support and positive distraction (Ulrich);
Restorative nature, through being away, fascination, extent and compatibility (Kaplan, Attention Restoration Theory).

Each garden space carries one stage. Linked, they stage a single recovery at the scale of a life, and retrace the site’s own arc: being held by care, reclaiming oneself, taking care up again.

Nine engraved stones mark the key steps, in Latin, Italian and translated voices, from the Carthusian order to Basaglia.

The inward steps

the Secret gardens

The walk begins outside the garden, in the fragile state of a person in need of reconstruction, and truly starts at the threshold of the central axis. The first steps turn toward the self, held in the Secret gardens: enclosed, intimate chambers in which to withdraw, gather one’s thoughts, and confront and grieve the past.

Standing in the open

The Rondò and the Prato

At the middle of the axis, Dignity reclaims the present self (worth, history and uniqueness) once denied by the asylum, at a Rondò around a newly planted lime, where the person stands among peers, in the open. The walk then opens north into the Prato, where Recognition, Hope and Hindsight carry the strength to stand among others, be moved by the surroundings, and look back on the path. Hindsight rests at the Fermata, where a chestnut (Castanea sativa) closes the eastern end of the axis.

Agency and return Tending the Garden

Last comes Agency, the moment the one who was cared for begins to care in turn: a direct invitation to take authorship and responsibility through gardening, in the pavilion chamber south of the Fermata. The journey ends when the visitor steps outside the garden, carrying care back into the world, to continue, or to begin anew, on their own. Care given back: the myth completed in a single life.