Giardino dei Semplici: The Medici Herb Garden
Why is it significant?
Through the gate on Via Micheli the traffic fades, and you walk into geometric beds, gravel paths, old greenhouses and trees so tall they shade half the garden. It feels like a secret, and for most visitors to Florence it still is. This is the Giardino dei Semplici, the garden of simples.
Key Facts
| Place | Giardino dei Semplici: The Medici Herb Garden |
|---|---|
| Address | Via Pier Antonio Micheli 3, 50121 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77920, 11.26130 |
| Part of Walk | From the Dome to David: Brunelleschi, Ghiberti and Michelangelo in Florence |
| Generated | Generated |
Through the gate on Via Micheli the traffic fades, and you walk into geometric beds, gravel paths, old greenhouses and trees so tall they shade half the garden. It feels like a secret, and for most visitors to Florence it still is.
This is the Giardino dei Semplici, the garden of simples. In the sixteenth century a simple was a medicinal plant, a single ingredient an apothecary could grind into a remedy. Cosimo the First de' Medici founded the garden in 1545, on land that had belonged to Dominican nuns, only months after the universities of Pisa and Padua had founded theirs. That makes it one of the three oldest botanical gardens in the world.
And it was designed by a sculptor. Niccolò Tribolo was Cosimo's favourite garden maker; he also planned the gardens of the Medici villa at Castello and drew the first design of the Boboli Gardens across the river. For the Medici, a garden was a work of art, a collection and a laboratory all at once, and the line between painter, gardener and scientist was thin.
Cosimo's son Francesco took it even further. In his workshops at the Casino di San Marco, a few streets from here, he experimented with alchemy, rock crystal and furnaces, and around 1575 his craftsmen produced Medici porcelain, the first successful attempt in Europe to imitate Chinese porcelain. Painters like Jacopo Ligozzi made astonishingly precise studies of plants and animals for him. Art and science were the same passion here.
Look for the giant yew near the paths; it is said to have been planted in 1720 by the botanist Pier Antonio Micheli, who gave his name to the street outside. Today the garden belongs to the University of Florence's natural history museum and keeps thousands of plants, from medicinal herbs to tropical rarities in the glasshouses. Leave by the gate, head west to the long, straight Via Cavour, and look for a plain doorway at number 69.