4 
Bologna 
The botanic garden at Bologna, next visited, was established by 
the Senate of Bologna in 1567 under the initiative of Uliss1 Aldro- 
vandi (1522-1605), who was made its first director and so con- 
tinued for 38 years (1567-1605). He was a pupil of Ghini. The 
present director of the garden is Professor L. Buscaliont. On the 
wall of the botanical lecture room of the University of Bologna 1s 
the following quotation from the Philosophical Botany of Lin- 
naeus: AMethodus naturalis ultiinus finis botanices est et erit. 
Florence 
In Florence, next visited, there are, in addition to the Botanic 
Gardens, the Reale Instituto Forestale di Villombrosa, the Arboreto 
Tozzie Siemoni, and the Gardino 
3oboli, famous for its topiary 
work, 
Unfortunately these gardens were closed during our very 
brief stay in Florence, but since the accounts of the founding of 
the Florence garden, as given by different writers, have not always 
been easy to harmonize (especially with reference to Ghini and the 
Pisa garden), it seems best to give a brief summary here, for which 
I have drawn fully on Saceardo’s La botanica in /talia. 
Cosmo | entrusted the foundation of a botanic garden to Luca 
Ghini. There are no official documents by which the exact date 
may be fixed, but Ghini was lecturer on simples in Pisa in 1544 
and founded that garden in 1547. The Florence garden is known 
to have been in existence in 1557, having been planted in the vicin- 
ity of San Marco. Subsequently it was neglected, but in 1718 it 
was flourishing again under the care of the botanical society of 
Florence. That society united with the Academy of Agriculture 
in 1783, and the garden became transformed into an agricultural 
experiment garden. Some years before (in 1737) Giovanni Tar- 
gionl-Tozzetti created a chair of botany at the natural history 
museum, and a portion of the Boboli garden was annexed to the 
botanic garden. At that time the old botanic garden of San 
Mareo became again a garden of simples. In 1883 the agricultural 
experiment garden was converted into an educational botanic gar- 
den, and shortly thereafter the botanical museum of 
Sobol was 
moved to the new San Marco building. 
