On October 18th, we had the pleasure of attending the grand opening of the Santa Claus Village at Mondo Verde in Taneto di Gattatico, a garden center in the province of Reggio Emilia. A spectacular fireworks display welcomed visitors to a truly immersive shopping experience filled with holiday spirit. The ‘wow’ factor is repeated at the entrance of each room that makes up the long journey through 4,500 square meters of themed and decorated rooms in various colors and styles. It’s not just a ‘market,’ or a simple exhibition of Christmas decorations and lights, but a show where visitors are captivated by the many different settings and surprising suggestions present in each room.

In fact, to cover the costs, visitors pay a 3-euro entrance fee (5 euros on weekends). I think it’s the only Italian garden center that does this. If you think it’s strange to charge customers to visit such a spectacle, you should know that the Santa Claus Village at Mondo Verde attracts over 10,000 visitors every Sunday.

To understand the Santa Claus Village project, we need to know more about Mondo Verde garden center and its founders. As is tradition with Italian SMEs, it is a family business composed of the Salati siblings, Roberta and Massimo, and their respective spouses, Alessandro Puccinelli and Romina Gianotti. They took their first steps in 1992 with a small flower business, but just a few years later they began to mature the project of opening a larger gardening center: the leap in quality was realized in 2002 with the inauguration of the current headquarters.

Despite being in the heart of the rich Po Valley, it is not located in a particularly populous catchment area, one that would justify a continuous flow of customers throughout the year on such a large exhibition “platform”. Over time, the owners have been able to gradually expand the store to transform it into an “attraction garden center” with a high-level shopping experience capable of attracting customers even from other regions. Thus becoming an interregional reference point during peak periods of the year, thus compensating for a not particularly generous catchment area. One of the two peak moments is the Christmas period and the Santa Claus Village is how Mondo Verde interprets its role as an “attraction garden center”. It is a show that is completely renewed every year and manages to attract more than 10,000 people on Sundays in November and December, involving visitors who travel even from Lombardy and Veneto.

The same “attractive” activity is repeated in spring and summer with one of the most extensive exhibitions of outdoor furniture, including barbecues and outdoor hot tubs.

Over the years, the store has been constantly improved, with interventions such as the expansion of the exhibition area with a 1,700 sqm pavilion on two floors in 2009, the introduction of the Mondo Verde Café in 2010, photovoltaic systems in 2011, the internal covering of the nursery in 2015 to improve the comfort of customer visits in an air-conditioned environment in summer, up to the recent opening of the Weber Store dedicated to barbecues and the exclusive distribution of Jacuzzi outdoor.

Today, Mondo Verde covers a total covered area of 9,500 sqm.