A gazebo is a pavilion structure, sometimes octagonal, that may be built, in parks, gardens, and spacious public areas.

Gazebos are freestanding or attached to a garden wall, roofed, and open on all sides; they provide shade, shelter, ornamental features in a landscape, and a place to rest. Some gazebos in public parks are large enough to serve as bandstands or rain shelters.

Gazebos include pagodas, pavilions, kiosks, belvederes, follies, alambras, pergolas, and rotundas. Such structures are popular in warm and sunny climates. They are in the literature of China, Persia, and many other classical civilizations, going back to several millennia. Examples of such structures are the garden houses at Montacute House in Somerset, England. The gazebo at Elton on the Hill in Nottinghamshire, thought to date from the late 18th or early 19th century, is a square battlemented tower like a fort, part of an extensive system of red-brick walled gardens.

The word origin is unknown and has no cognates in other European languages. False etymologies are proposed, such as the French Que c'est beau ("How beautiful") and the Macaronic Latin gazebo ("I shall gaze"). L.L. Bacon proposed a derivation from Casbah, a Muslim quarter around the citadel in Algiers. W. Sayers proposed Hispano-Arabic qushaybah, in a poem by Cordoban poet Ibn Quzman (d. 1160).

Romano Prodi (Italian pronunciation: [roˈmaːno ˈprɔːdi] ( listen); born 9 August 1939) is an Italian politician and statesman. He served as the Prime Minister of Italy, from 17 May 1996 to 21 October 1998 and from 17 May 2006 to 8 May 2008. He was also the tenth President of the European Commission from 1999 to 2004.

Prodi ran in 1996 as lead candidate of The Olive Tree coalition, winning the general election and serving as Prime Minister of Italy until 1998. Following the victory of his coalition The Union over the House of Freedoms led by Silvio Berlusconi in the April 2006 Italian elections Prodi was in power again. On 24 January 2008, he lost a vote of confidence in the Senate house, and consequently tendered his resignation as Prime Minister to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, but continued in office for almost four months for routine business, until early elections were held and a new government was formed.

On 14 October 2007, Prodi became the first President of the Democratic Party upon foundation of the party.