The Minerva garden is a botanical garden located in the upper part of the historic center of Salerno.
It is a structure of considerable importance from a historical point of view because in the Middle Ages it was used as an educational laboratory for the students of the then medical school of Salerno and the simple or the herbs considered to be basic type were grown to make compounds obtained by mixing more simple according to the proportions indicated in the various medical treatises.

It was probably the first botanical garden in Europe.
The garden belonged to the noble Silvatico family but it was around 1300 that Matteo Silvatico, a prestigious master of the Salerno medical school, used it to cultivate the simple ones and to study the therapeutic properties of plants from the most disparate known lands. From this study work, Opus Pandectarum Medicinae was born in 1317