Boboli Gardens

The Boboli Gardens (Italian: Giardino di Boboli /ˈbo.bo.li/) is a large park in Florence, originally designed as the garden of the Medici family's Pitti Palace in the mid-16th century. It is an important early Italian garden which influenced aristocratic gardens across Europe. It houses statues of various styles and periods, large fountains, and artificial grottoes.

History and layout

The Gardens, directly behind the Pitti Palace, the main seat of the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany at Florence, are some of the first and most familiar formal 16th-century Italian gardens. The mid-16th-century garden style, as it was developed here, incorporated longer axial developments, wide gravel avenues, a considerable "built" element of stone, the lavish employment of statuary and fountains, and a proliferation of detail, coordinated in semi-private and public spaces that were informed by classical accents: grottos, nympheums, garden temples and the like. The openness of the gardens, with their expansive view of the city, was unconventional for its time. The gardens were very lavish, considering that no access was allowed to anyone outside the immediate Medici family, and no entertainment or parties are ever known to have taken place in them.

The Boboli Gardens were laid out for Eleonora di Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I de' Medici. The name may be a corruption of "Bogoli" or "Borgolo", possibly the name of a family who had previously owned the land. The first stage had scarcely been begun by Niccolò Tribolo when he died in 1550, after which the construction was continued by Bartolomeo Ammanati.