Let’s start! The Green circuit project at the Ghirardi Botanic Garden (Toscolano Maderno - Brescia, Italy)

In the context of the current plans of sustainable tourism, a three-year project titled “Green circuit, journey in and out of the botanical garden” (2024-2026) has recently started at the Ghirardi Botanical Garden, following an agreement stipulated between the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences of the University of Milan and the municipality of Toscolano Maderno (Brescia, Northern Italy). The Green circuit represents a tourist itinerary with a whole territory as its destination, which enhances its resources and assets, both material and immaterial, through a “green key”. In fact, the plant world represents the common element of three local cultural realities: the Ghirardi Botanical Garden, the Bernini Park, and the Paper Mill Valley jointly with the Paper Museum. The goal is to encourage sustainable tourist routes, through educational offers able to combine the cultural attractiveness of the territory to its aesthetic and recreational value. A pivotal step of the project is the active involvement of the local community: indeed, what is offered by a territory must be closely linked to the desire of its residents to conserve and promote it, because “they feel it”. Thus, residents become responsible for the knowledge and the protection and promotion of their territory, beginning with the plant heritage preserved at the Ghirardi Botanical Garden. During the first year, several different actions were initiated: 1. the creation of a group of volunteers thanks to a dedicated training course; 2. the design and realization of ad hoc interpretative apparatuses; 3. the planning and promotion of specific open-air educational offers, focused on direct observation and active experimentation. These activities have been now permanently included in the dissemination and educational offers of the Botanical Garden and will be extended to local schools, as educational proposals to support regular teaching activities. In the first year, special attention will be also paid to the design of illustrative panels that gradually, across the project, will shift the visitor's attention from the Botanical Garden itself to the plant resources of the other target institutions: the monumental trees of the Bernini Park (to be explored during the second year) and the autochthonous species of the Paper Mill Valley (to be explored during the third year).