Boboli Gardens: a living work of art
Tuscany boasts an extraordinary number of villas and gardens. From the 15th century on, gardens were created for palaces or more often villas, in both city and countryside, practically without interruption. This is a region where nature merges with art, the past with the present. A garden calls for great care and attention, maintaining it is frequently expensive. Ancient gardens in particular, those that everyone would like to visit, are hard to keep up and often diffifult to enter.
Boboli is known the world over as one of Italy’s most important gardens. So famous that its name alone evokes the idea of a Renaissance garden, Boboli is one of the peak achievements in the Italian art of gardening. The park as we see it today is chiefly the result of two initiatives; first the 16th century garden behind the Pitti Palace was created, then between 1630 and 1631, the cypress avenue designed by Giulio Parigi was planted.
The construction of the Medicean garden began when Eleonora, wife of Cosimo I, purchased land known at the time as the “Pitti garden” from the name of the first owners. Niccolò Pericoli, known as Tribolo, was commissioned to design the garden. The sculptor based its layout on the perspective axis that traverses the entrance to the palace and rises along the hill behind it. In place of what remained of stone quarry he built an amphitheater divided by ragnaie and lined with fruit trees. To the left of the palace a great flower garden was planted. Numerous artists worked on this magnificent garden. When Tribolo died he was succeded by Davide Forini, then, between 1554 an d1561 by Giorgio Vasari followed by Bartolomeo Ammannati from 1560 to 1583. After 1574 Bernardo Buontalenti was also summoned by Francesco I to work at Boboli.
Boboli is the model of the garden-museum, a garden created to display ancient and modern statues. It can also be considered the exemplification of a perfect manual on garden art, due to the multitude of elements that, over the course of the centuries, have gone to make up this extraordinary work of art.
