Boboli Gardens
— — the hill the Medici shaped into rooms.
Not only on a wall.
“The garden behind the Palazzo Pitti, cut into the hillside above the Arno. The Medici started it in 1550 and kept building for two hundred years: an amphitheatre with an Egyptian obelisk at its centre, a cypress avenue running down to a pond with an island in it, a grotto where water once ran over false stalactites. Box hedge clipped to the same lines since the sixteenth century. Part of it opened to the public in 1766, and on a weekday morning, before the coach tours, the gravel paths are nearly empty and Florence lies below through gaps in the trees.
Boboli Gardens, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Boboli Gardens climb the hillside directly behind the Palazzo Pitti, on the south bank of the Arno in the Oltrarno district of Florence, in Tuscany. They cover about 45,000 square metres and form one of the earliest and largest formal Italian gardens, the model later copied at royal courts across Europe. Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de' Medici, bought the palace in 1549, and the garden was begun the next year by Niccolo Tribolo. When Tribolo died in 1550 the work passed to Bartolomeo Ammannati, Giorgio Vasari, and Bernardo Buontalenti, and later to Giulio and Alfonso Parigi, who extended the long Viottolone axis early in the seventeenth century.
Behind the palace the ground opens into a horseshoe amphitheatre, cut from the quarry that gave the Pitti its stone, where the Medici staged court spectacles. At its centre stands an ancient Egyptian obelisk carved for Ramesses II at Heliopolis, carried to Rome in antiquity, kept for years at the Villa Medici, and raised here in 1790 above a great Roman granite basin. Higher up, the Grotta del Buontalenti, built between 1583 and 1593, drips with false stalactites and shells; it once held Michelangelo's unfinished Prisoners, now shown as casts with the originals in the Accademia, and still shelters Giambologna's bathing Venus. At the foot of the long cypress avenue the Fountain of the Ocean rises on its island, and near the palace the court dwarf Morgante rides a tortoise, carved by Valerio Cioli in 1560.
Part of the garden first opened to the public in 1766, under the Habsburg-Lorraine grand dukes, and it is now run by the Gallerie degli Uffizi, entered through the courtyard of the Palazzo Pitti. A single ticket usually takes in the neighbouring Bardini garden and the porcelain museum at the top of the hill. It is a steep, mostly open place, best walked early: the gravel climbs from the amphitheatre past the Kaffeehaus, a coffee-house finished in 1775 to designs by Zanobi Del Rosso, toward the Forte di Belvedere and the long view over the rooftops to the Duomo. Summer afternoons fall hot and shadeless on the upper terraces, so the first hours after opening, or the last before the gates close, suit it best.