Beyond the Yalla Dog

Katie in Boboli gardens - our first rain

Our tour leader Dr Katie Campbell this morning in the Boboli gardens – we suffered our first serious rain – but not enough to stop the tour!    The Boboli garden – as a 16th Medician garden obviously doesn’t qualify as an Anglo-American garden – but it is big and interesting – and in the centre of Florence – so it seems silly to leave it out – especially as we wanted a local day as Katie is guest lecturer at the British Institute Library 18.00 tonight.

The garden has been developed and changed considerably since it’s first conception by Niccolo Pericoli (aka Tribolo) – the gardener used the area of the stone quarry, from which the stone to build the Pitti Palace had been hewed, to create an amphitheatre , divided by ragnaie (wooded areas where nets were hung to catch the little birds so beloved of the Medici dinner table!) and fruit trees.

One important feature in all gardens is water – and Cosimo 1 Grand Duke of Tuscany was a local hero because he had used some of his wealth and power wisely and diverted water from the Apennines into Florence. This endeared him to the locals and led him to place statues of Neptune – God of water  -all over the City to remind people to whom they owed this luxury.

Cosimo’s wife, Eleanor di Toledo, purchased the Pitti Palace and gardens to create a safer home for her growing family and the new garden must have been a pretty spectacular place to play!

This grotesque head below is the end of a Renaissance  water feature in the Boboli gardens- but not the original! When it was replaced the original was purchased by Arthur Acton for use in his Villa La Petria – also shown below.

Mascaron water carrier in Boboli - 20th Century

Original Mascaron from the Boboli gardens - in situ at La Petria since early 1900s