Gucci to finance restoration of Boboli Gardens

The Florence-based fashion house Gucci will donate two million euros to the Uffizi Gallery to restore and enhance the Boboli Gardens (Giardino di Boboli, in Italian). The announcement was made by Gucci CEO Marco Bizzarri, Uffizi Director Eike Schmidt and Florence Mayor Dario Nardella. As part of the deal, for the first time, the Gucci Cruise show will take place on May 29, 2018 in the Galleria Palatina of the iconic Palazzo Pitti, which maintains the world-famous gardens. The Boboli Spring project, promoted by the Italian culture ministry under the aegis of the Florence city council, in partnership with the Uffizi Gallery, will make the greenery of the garden thrive again and restore it to its status as the Italian Versailles, said Schmidt. The Boboli Gardens, directly behind the Pitti Palace, the main seat of the Medici grand dukes of Tuscany at Florence, are some of the first and most familiar formal 16th-century Italian gardens. The mid-16th-century garden style, as it was developed here, incorporated longer axial developments, wide gravel avenues, a considerable built element of stone, the lavish employment of statuary and fountains, and a proliferation of detail, coordinated in semi-private and public spaces that were informed by classical accents: grottos, nympheums, garden temples and the like. The Boboli Gardens were laid out for Eleonora di Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I de’ Medici. The name is a curruption of Bogoli, a family from whom land had been bought to construct the garden.