This is a preview of the content in our Florence Art & Culture app. Get the app to:
  • Read offline
  • Remove ads
  • Access all content
  • Use the in-app Map to find sites, and add custom locations (your hotel...)
  • Build a list of your own favourites
  • Search the contents with full-text search functionality
  • ... and more!
iOS App Store Google Play

Boboli Gardens

The Dukes' Revels

The Boboli in 1599

Stretching up invitingly from the Pitti Palace, the shady green of the Boboli Gardens, Florence’s largest (and only) central garden of any size, is an irresistible oasis in the middle of a stone-hard city. Some of its acres once belonged to the Bogoli family, and a corruption of their name stuck to the place.

The Boboli was not the first of the great Renaissance Italian gardens, but it arrived at a time when the mania for aristocratic formal pleasure gardens was at its peak. In 1550, with the expansion of the Pitti Palace underway, Duke Cosimo I hired sculptor Niccolò Tribolo to plan its gardens. Many hands worked on it afterwards—Vasari, Ammannati and especially Bernardo Buontalenti—and little outside the central axis remains from Tribolo's plan. The result, however, became the model for all the great royal gardens of Europe, including Louis XIV's Versailles.

Read the full content in the app
iOS App Store Google Play

Parks and Gardens

Top Sights

Text © Dana Facaros & Michael Pauls

Images by Giano 2, Creative Commons License, Sailko, Sailko, GNU Creative Commons License, Wikimedia