Boboli Gardens (Giardino di Boboli)
Stretching up the hillside behind Palazzo Pitti, the Boboli Gardens are a 45,000-square-metre open-air museum of Renaissance landscape design, dotted with fountains, grottos, classical statues and cypress avenues. They offer shade, birdsong and sweeping views of Florence — a genuine green escape in the middle of a stone city.
Highlights inside the gardens
Head first to the Isolotto — an oval pond at the garden's lower end with a central island, a Giambologna fountain and a ring of terracotta pots bursting with lemon trees. It is the most photographed spot in the gardens and genuinely as beautiful as it looks.
The Buontalenti Grotto near the Pitti Palace entrance is a bizarre and wonderful Mannerist creation from the 1580s — its walls encrusted with fake stalactites, shells and sponge-stone, hiding cast of Michelangelo's Prisoners in the corners. It is one of the strangest rooms in all of Florence.
The gardens as a walking route
A path climbs from the Pitti Palace entrance through cypress-lined avenues to the Kaffeehaus pavilion, a small 18th-century coffee house perched on the hillside with a terrace overlooking the city. It serves drinks and light snacks and the view from its terrace rivals Piazzale Michelangelo for sheer romance.
From the Kaffeehaus you can exit the gardens through the upper gate onto Via Romana and walk directly to Piazzale Michelangelo in about 20 minutes, making the gardens a natural first leg of a classic Florentine hilltop walk.
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