THE BOBOLI GARDENS, 
FLORENCE. 
HIE public gardens of any great town are 
hardly ever interesting; they have an 
official look ; miles of well-raked gravel 
paths are enough to damp the most lively 
imagination. Yet the Boboli was always a Court 
garden, and all the red tape cannot blot out a 
stately and interesting past. 
The garden is laid out on a steep hill at the 
back of that palace that Luca Pitti sold to 
Eleanora de Medici, the widow of Cosimo I., in 
1549. Eleanora was an excellent, good woman, 
but she was never popular with the Florentines, 
who described her as of an insopportabile gravita. 
Tribolo laid out the garden for her, together 
with Buontalenti, and Bartolomeo Ammanti helped 
to ornament and erect many of the buildings. 
Near the entrance is a grotto, painted with birds 
and flowers, and adorned with coloured stucco 
figures, once gay enough, but now rather forlorn 
and tawdry. Set into its trumpery work, incon- 
gruous and particularly out of keeping, are 
four half-finished statues by Michael Angelo, 
intended for the monument of Julius II., the 
work for which is described as a_ tragedy by 
Condivi, the biographer of the great Florentine. 
The statues were intended for captives, and im- 
prisoned for ever, as they are, in the marble, half- 
struggling to light, they have a double significance. 
In the inner chamber is a Venus by Gian Bologna, 
the principal figure of a fountain. The main 
road mounts up the hill to the back of the palace, 
which, detached and spacious as is its fagade, is 
at the back, sunk in a deep trench-like cutting, 
which has necessitated the architect’s inventing all 
sorts of expedients for filling up and bridging over. 
A sort of raised gallery, with a very fine and 
elaborate fountain, fills the main vacuum, towards 
which the first floor of the palace looks straight 
out across a paved court. The great open slope 
immediately at the back of the palace is given 
up to a really magnificent amphitheatre, one of 
those mises-en-scenes which bring home to us what 
regal ideas of entertainment they had in the 
Renaissance. It is really large, yet amusing as a 
faint copy of the great classic models from which 
the idea was taken. It hzs six tiers of seats in a 
huge semi-circle of stone, which is separated from 
the arena by a stone balustrade with fluted pillars, 
tasteful, even severe, and, like the little niches 
which ornament the amphitheatre at intervals, 
and which are filled alternately by a vase and a 
statue, far removed from the florid and flippant 
style of the baroque, which was just coming into 
vogue. 
The view from the right-hand corner of the 
amphitheatre is famous; but let Shelley speak 
of it, for it is not altered at all since he saw 
it: “ You see below, Florence, a smokeless city, 
its domes and spires occupying the vale; and 
beyond, to the right, the Apennines, whose base 
extends even to the walls. The green valleys of 
these mountains, which gently unfold themselves 
upon the plain, and the intervening hills covered 
with vineyards and olive orchards, are occupied 
by the villas, which are, as it were, another city, 
a Babylon of palaces and gardens. In the midst 
of the picture rolls the Arno, through woods and 
bounded by the aérial snow and summits of the 
Lucchese Apennines. On the left, a magnificent 
buttress of lofty, craggy hills juts out in many 
shapes over a lovely vale, and approaches the walls 
of the city. Cascine and ville occupy the pinnacles 
and abutments of those hills, over which is seen 
at intervals the ethereal mountain line, heavy with 
snow The vale below is covered with cypress 
groups, whose obeliskine forms of intense green 
pierce the grey shadow of the hill that overhangs 
them. The cypresses, too, of this garden form a 
magnificent foreground of accumulated verdure ; 
pyramids of dark leaves and shining cones rising 
out of the mass, beneath which are cut, like 
caverns, recesses which conduct into walks. The 
cathedral, with its marble campanile, and the domes 
and spires of Florence, are at our feet.” 
From hardly any other place does one get such 
a view of the marble bell-tower and Brunelleschi’s 
wonderful brown dome. They seem to stand out 
above all the surrounding houses, relieved against 
the sky, and flanked by the graceful tower of 
the Palazzo Vecchio, “noblest symbol of civic 
liberty in the world,’ which sends the deep 
note of its bell across the summer air. Behind 
the amphitheatre the ground climbs straight up 
to a plateau, laid out in a sheet of water in a 
