Faithful to the mission that we have set ourselves, to make known the accessible tourism destinations of our region, Campania, we want to let you participate in our very recent discovery. This is the Secret Garden of Airola (*), an educational park located precisely in the Benevento municipality of Airola. To describe it, we steal the words from their illustrative brochure: The Secret Garden of Airola is a botanical-zoological educational park. It houses more than 16 thousand plants and 300 animals and different types of gardens: from the English one to the simple one, the Japanese one, the Chinese one, the tropical garden, the cacti and succulent garden, up to the Australian one (unique in Italy). The description should not make you think of something too vast: the park can be visited easily in a morning, if you take advantage of the guided tour with the relative explanations, provided by the very kind owner Giovanni Ianniello, landscape architect, creator and curator of the structure. As for our needs for accessibility and practicability, the visit does not present particular difficulties, even if it is preferable to be accompanied, to overcome the gravelly stretch of the Japanese garden and some other more difficult point. The park has its own natural didactic function, so it is open by appointment for visits by groups, schools, associations; the website is https://www.ilgiardinosegretoairola.org/ and the Facebook page is called Il Giardino Segreto Airola. Here are some images taken on Saturday 8 June 2019:
After the visit, our suggestion for lunch is to get back on the road and move about fifteen kilometers towards Sant'Agata dei Goti; after a few kilometers, you will find on the left the sign indicating this farm with our requirements: Agriturismo Ape Regina (*): Molino Corte, Sant'Agata dei Goti +39 0823 956698 / 338 8806 415 www.agriturismoaperegina.it (*) symbol indicating the presence of toilets equipped for motion disabilities We take advantage of the opportunity and make a quick visit to the historic center of Sant'Agata dei Goti, a town that stands on a tufaceous ridge on which the Samnite city of Saticula was once settled, mentioned by Virgil in the Aeneid; the following centuries of history have enriched the city with numerous churches and monuments, completely inaccessible at the time of our last visit (2014); the country was then experiencing a moment of international fame as the hometown of Bill De Blasio, just elected mayor of New York. We therefore limit ourselves to giving some pictures of the streets and the outside of the monuments, because it is still pleasant to walk in this well-preserved center:
