Flowers of Florence: (more) “giardini di Firenze” to see

Flowers of Florence: a city with – quite literally – flowers in in name and its heritage has to be packed with beautiful gardens! A few post ago we brought you to the Giardino dell’Iris – the Iris Garden not far from Piazzale Michelangelo.

Let’s discover together more Florentine gardens!

Flowers of Florence: the Bardini’s Garden – Il Giardino Bardini

Visiting the Giardino Bardini is a bit like to experience time travel… with flowers 😉 The area of the garden was known from the Middle ages as “collina di Montecuccoli”, Montecuccoli’s Hill. It was owned by the Mozzi family. The first record of the garden dates to 1259.

This document reports a walled garden nearby the Mozzi palace.

We are quite far from the Renaissance splendors of Boboli: it was a “Hortus conclusus”, the Medieval enclosed garden which, as in Boccaccio’s Decameron, has its designed related to safety needs (in Boccaccio’s work the enemy is not a warband but something more subtle yet much more deadly: the bubonic plague) too.

In 1309 The Mozzi family bankrupted and the giardino became part of the Florence comune’s possessions. In 1591 the Mozzis were back on track, and the family have been owning the Giardino until 1880.

From Mozzi manor to Villa Bardini

The new owners were the Carolath Benten noble family: they actually made some changes to the original garden layout, adding an English garden section.

The Mozzi family complex (the palace, the garden, along with some agricultural land) was finally sold to Stefano Bardini in 1913: Villa Bardini was born…

Stefano Bardini (1836-1922) was an art dealer and restorer (he worked also on Botticelli and Simone Martini works). Stefano used the Mozzi building as a sort of personal museum, which finally had become property of Florence only in 1996, after a fight on the Stefano’s testament between his heirs.

The Bardini family vicissitudes didn’t help neither the palace nor the garden, but they were massively restored after 2000.

Now the Giardino Bardini is simply a must see: it’s wysteria arbour will leave you breathless!