The Medici's power garden: architecture in cypress and stone.
~€10 garden / ~€16 palace2 h15 min from home
The story
1 min readThe prototype 'Italian garden' (1549): axes, clipped theaters of green, statuary as propaganda. See the amphitheater with its Ramses II obelisk, the dripping Buontalenti Grotto (Michelangelo's Prisoners stood inside for 350 years), and the Viottolone cypress avenue plunging to the island fountain.
Palazzo Pitti was begun in 1458 by the banker Luca Pitti expressly to out-build the Medici. It bankrupted him; the Medici bought it. Florentine irony has no better sentence.
The shot
Down the Viottolone avenue, and the skyline from the Neptune basin ridge; late-afternoon slanting light in the amphitheater is the goodbye image of Florence.