Boboli Gardens

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.