Giardino di Boboli

Behind Palazzo Pitti, the Boboli Gardens climb the hillside that Eleonora de' Toledo chose in 1549 for a grand-ducal garden. Grottos, an obelisk-crowned amphitheatre, long avenues and centuries of statuary make it a sculpture park as much as a garden — the Uffizi Galleries call it the origin of a style European courts copied.

Why it matters

Boboli is where the Italian garden became an export. The Uffizi Galleries, which administer it with Palazzo Pitti, describe how the Medici shaped this hillside into the model followed by many European courts, and how the Habsburg-Lorraine and Savoy dynasties later pushed it toward Porta Romana along the old walls. The garden's features include an amphitheatre dug into the slope, grottos, avenues lined with ancient and Renaissance statues, fountains, pavilions and views over Florence's domes from the highest lawns.

What to notice

Begin at the courtyard axis behind the palace, where the Amphitheatre rises in stone arcades — converted from garden architecture to masonry by Giulio Parigi in 1631, and crowned by an ancient Egyptian obelisk that reached the Medici through their Roman collections, with a basin from the Baths of Caracalla set before it. The Statue of Abundance, begun by Giambologna and completed by Pietro Tacca, watches over it all. Take the Grotta Grande next: Bernardo Buontalenti built it between 1583 and 1593 over a nursery designed by Vasari, and its limestone stalactites, shells and terracotta reliefs once ran with water. On the southern axis, the Viottolone leads to the Isolotto, the island basin designed by Alfonso Parigi with Giambologna's Ocean at its centre. Along the way, note the Bandinelli workshop sculptures, Giambologna's Bathing Venus, the Artichoke Fountain by Giovan Francesco Susini, Mitoraj's modern bronze Tindaro Screpolato among the antiquities, the Rococo Kaffeehaus pavilion, and the Lemon House of 1777–1778, raised on the site of Cosimo III's zoo to house hundreds of citrus tubs.

Context and history

The garden began in 1549, when Niccolò Pericoli, known as Tribolo, laid out the hillside for Duchess Eleonora of Toledo after the Medici bought the Pitti palace; Tribolo died soon after, and the work passed through Bartolomeo Ammannati to Bernardo Buontalenti, while the earlier Grotto of Madama dates from 1553–1555 and Buontalenti's great Grotto defined the garden's theatrical spirit. The Parigi family — Giulio and Alfonso — extended it southward for Cosimo II and Ferdinando II, creating the Viottolone and the Isolotto. Under Grand Duke Peter Leopold the Lorraine architects Gaspare Maria Paoletti, Giuseppe Cacialli, Pasquale Poccianti and Zanobi del Rosso rebuilt terraces and pavilions, del Rosso adding the Kaffeehaus and the Lemon House, where the citrus trees the Medici had collected since the sixteenth century were wintered in earthenware tubs. Each dynasty therefore left a readable layer, which is why the Uffizi Galleries present the park as an open-air museum rather than a garden.