Italia: 301,230 km2
Australia: 7,692,024 km2, though vast swathes of that are utterly useless and hateful desert.

60 years ago it was the case that most people – by no means all – in Australia had a bit of land to call their own (even if it was rented) and could create a garden in it. The exceptions? There have always been inner city dwellers who lived in once-undesirable terraces, and in the suburbs blocks of low rise flats were not unknown. But for most people there was a bit of land around before housing costs went up like the Hindenburg (in many senses) and population density in cities blew up in a parallel fashion.

In Italia on the other hand town dwellers rarely had that luxury, especially in the hilltop towns that were necessarily fortified for protection in the Medieval period. Yet some degree of greenery that you can see up close and touch and grow has always been important for many people, and in the cities and towns and villages of Italia they found a way. Gardens were created with the creative use of potted plants.

In the course of the next few images, we'll see how residents in a town of stone still manage to have a bit of local greenery around them.

We start with a simple plant in a pot, neatly maintained and mounted in front of (what I assume to be) a disused doorway of one of the stone houses of Via Fontebella.