The Boboli Gardens extend between palazzo Pitti, Forte Belvedere and the Porta Romania. It's the typical Italian garden that mixes architecturalized nature and natural architecture, hosting sculptures and plastics from antiquity to the 19th century.

Palazzo Pitti was built, at the feet of the hill of Boboli, at the will of the Florentine banker Bonaccorso Pitti. Filippo Brunelleschi's project, from which the work was commissioned, was realized by his disciple Luca Fancelli. In 1550 the palazzo, which had remained unfinished, was bought by Cosimo I de' Medici and by his wife Eleonora di Toledo. Cosimo I, called Niccolò Tribolo to construct his garden. Tribolo died the year after.

Splendor, space and elegant inventions make the Boboli the most magnificent of Italian Renaissance gardens, where variety of plants, hundreds of fountains, groves and terraces, the admirable grotto of Buontalenti make a walk through it a constant source of inexhaustible surprises. Guarded by hundreds of statues, some grotesque some realistic, art and nature meet in the spirit of true Mannerism and 17th. century Baroque

The great grotto, designed by Buontalenti, is near the Palace and contains Giambologna’s Venus and Michaelangelo’s four Slaves. There used to be water tricks and games. The natural amphitheatre behind the Pitti Palace was made into a real amphitheatre after 1600 and continues to be for plays. The garden was then extended to the west (c1620). Walks lead up to a ridge and down to an enchanted oval garden with the famous Isoletto, an island of lemon trees and sculpture. The island has Giovanni da Bologna’s statue of Oceanus, described by Burkhart as ‘more simple and majestic than any other fountain in Italy or the whole western world’