Description
The Boboli Gardens are the great Italian-style garden behind Palazzo Pitti, on the hill of the Oltrarno: avenues of cypresses, fountains, grottoes and statues over about 45,000 square meters, a true open-air museum with sculptures from Roman antiquity to the 1900s.
Born as the grand dukes' garden, it was built between the 1500s and the 1800s, first by the Medici, then by the House of Lorraine and the Savoys. Since 2013 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. What you find here, above all, is a place to walk, climb and stop with a view of the city.
From the palace courtyard you enter the amphitheater, the big horseshoe-shaped hollow from which the pietraforte stone was quarried to build Pitti. It was fitted with its tiers in 1599 and inaugurated in 1637, and the niches with the statues are by the Parigi family.
Higher up is the Knight's Garden, above a bastion fortified by Michelangelo in 1529, with boxwood beds, roses and dahlias that bloom between May and June, and the Fountain of the Monkeys.
Down below, near the palace, is the Buontalenti Grotto, one of the most bizarre and surprising pieces of architecture in Florence, created between 1583 and 1593.
The Viottolone is a long avenue sloping downhill between two rows of cypresses planted in 1637, with Roman and eighteenth-century statues. At the bottom is the Isolotto, the pool ringed by holm oak hedges about 12 meters high and by many statues.
The eighteenth-century Kaffeehaus is a rare example of rococo taste in Tuscany, with a terrace over the city. The lemon house still has its original color, Lorraine green.
It all begins in 1549, when Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I, buys the Pitti palace and the land on the hill. The name Boboli perhaps comes from a family that owned these lands, the Borgoli.
The first design is by Niccolò Tribolo, who died soon after. He was followed by Ammannati and Buontalenti: the garden filled with statues, fountains and grottoes, with an undercurrent of alchemical symbols. The Grande Grotta represents the primordial chaos from which the initiate must emerge toward the light of knowledge.
Don't miss
• The amphitheater.
• The Buontalenti Grotto.
• The Knight's Garden.
• The Viottolone and the Isolotto.
Did you know?
• The Knight's Garden gets its name because in military architecture a "cavalier" is a structure built astride a bastion.
• Where the lemon house stands today, Cosimo III kept a menagerie of exotic animals, with giraffes and even a hippopotamus, now stuffed at the Specola.
Born as the grand dukes' garden, it was built between the 1500s and the 1800s, first by the Medici, then by the House of Lorraine and the Savoys. Since 2013 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. What you find here, above all, is a place to walk, climb and stop with a view of the city.
From the palace courtyard you enter the amphitheater, the big horseshoe-shaped hollow from which the pietraforte stone was quarried to build Pitti. It was fitted with its tiers in 1599 and inaugurated in 1637, and the niches with the statues are by the Parigi family.
Higher up is the Knight's Garden, above a bastion fortified by Michelangelo in 1529, with boxwood beds, roses and dahlias that bloom between May and June, and the Fountain of the Monkeys.
Down below, near the palace, is the Buontalenti Grotto, one of the most bizarre and surprising pieces of architecture in Florence, created between 1583 and 1593.
The Viottolone is a long avenue sloping downhill between two rows of cypresses planted in 1637, with Roman and eighteenth-century statues. At the bottom is the Isolotto, the pool ringed by holm oak hedges about 12 meters high and by many statues.
The eighteenth-century Kaffeehaus is a rare example of rococo taste in Tuscany, with a terrace over the city. The lemon house still has its original color, Lorraine green.
It all begins in 1549, when Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I, buys the Pitti palace and the land on the hill. The name Boboli perhaps comes from a family that owned these lands, the Borgoli.
The first design is by Niccolò Tribolo, who died soon after. He was followed by Ammannati and Buontalenti: the garden filled with statues, fountains and grottoes, with an undercurrent of alchemical symbols. The Grande Grotta represents the primordial chaos from which the initiate must emerge toward the light of knowledge.
Don't miss
• The amphitheater.
• The Buontalenti Grotto.
• The Knight's Garden.
• The Viottolone and the Isolotto.
Did you know?
• The Knight's Garden gets its name because in military architecture a "cavalier" is a structure built astride a bastion.
• Where the lemon house stands today, Cosimo III kept a menagerie of exotic animals, with giraffes and even a hippopotamus, now stuffed at the Specola.