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Boboli and Other Buildings built in the 1500's under Cosimo di Medici, Florence

Eleonora purchased the Pitti palace in 1549. She envisioned it as a place where the family and court could live in the open, green spaces of the hillside, far from the tight, grim walls of the ducal palace. The year following the purchase work began on the Boboli hill: the land was originally used for orchards and vegetable gardens, and there were also some stone quarries. The hillside portion that is aligned with the palace was defined along the bastions Cosimo built in 1544.

The design was done by Tribolo, one of the key figures in Cosimo's building programs between 1540 and 1550. In this early phase the garden - on which Ammannati may have worked as well - included the amphitheater and the Neptune pool. A fountain that Ammannati designed for the ducal palace was placed where the Artichoke Fountain stands today. In 1567-76 Giambologna's Ocean fountain was put in the middle of the amphitheater.

Cosimo and Eleonora shared an interest and passion for agriculture and botany. Every species of trees, rare and ornamental plants, flowers and fruits were brought to Boboli from distant lands.

Cosimo's successors shared this passion: Francesco I introduced the mulberry; Ferdinando I built conservatories, tepidaria and other facilities for tropical plants; Ferdinando II brought in pototates and broad-leafed oak; and Cosimo III raised every kind of citrus fruit known at the time.

In 1550, the same year that the Boboli Gardens were being planned, Cosimo built the Orto Mediceo Fiorentino ("Giardino dei Semplici" or Garden of Medicinal Plants). The garden was probably designed by Tribolo and it was definitely established on the model of the gardens opened in Pisa a few years earlier (1545).

In 1535, once again using the services of Tribolo, Cosimo made enormous changes in the gardens and villa at Castello, where his father and he himself had lived as a youth. Building villas and selecting locations had been a Medici family tradition since the fifteenth century. It developed significantly throughout the XVI century with Cosimo, Francesco and Ferdinando, and grew into a real territorial system of court residences during the various periods of the year according to carefully studied and intensely enjoyed cycles.

With his "territorial vision" Cosimo established various "stations" for his court around Florence and throughout Tuscany. Near Florence there was the villa at Careggi and the villa at Castello with its immense hunting reserve, the Petraia which Cosimo gave his son Ferdinando in 1568, the Topaia which Cosimo loaned to Ammirato and later to Varchi who called it Cosmiano, the Baroncelli (Poggio Imperiale) that Cosimo confiscated from the Salviati family and then gave to his daughter Isabella in 1565.

In the Mugello district there were two traditional Medici family residences, at Trebbio and Cafaggiolo; Cosimo added Terra del Sole, the Fortezza di San Martino near San Piero a Sieve which resembles the layout of Forte di Belvedere in Florence (probably started in the same year, that is 1569) and the Ambrogiana.

There was a growing trend among the new branch of the Medici family that came to power in the XVI century to prefer villas along the edges of the Florentine plain over those of the Mugello, the region of the early Medici. Elsewhere in the region, Cosimo could stay, either privately or with the court, at the ancient Medici estate of San Rossore at Leghorn (restructured as of 1546), at Portoferraio (1548) at Cerreto Guidi (1557), in the palace on the lungarno at Pisa (begun by Bandinelli in 1559, currently the "Palazzo Reale"), at Seravezza (1561), in the Medieval Rocca di Sala at Pietrasanta, at Colle Salvetti and in the palace in Siena.

Although he left the Medici palace in Via Larga Cosimo I did not neglect the development of the family's traditional district of San Lorenzo. During the fifth decade of the century he ordered Bandinelli to build a monument to his father, Giovanni dalle Bande Nere to be placed in the transept of the church of San Lorenzo. In 1543 the base of the monument was placed in the square as the market fountain and the statue itself was put in the ducal palace where it would remain until 1851.

During the same year, 1543, the duke commissioned Cellini to sculpt the Perseus and a Christ. The Perseus, placed in the loggia on the square in 1555 celebrated the absolute power of the Medici. Between 1555 and 1559 Ammannati and Vasari finished Michelangelo's works in San Lorenzo (Vasari's floor in the sacristy and Ammannati's staircase in the library). In 1566 it was decided to build the third sacristy as a mausoleum for the grand ducal tombs. The designs, with contributions by Giovanni dei Medici, Buontalenti and Giorgio Vasari the younger, were executed at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Between 1555 and 1560 Pontormo did the frescoes in the choir of San Lorenzo.

The victory over Siena in 1555 confirmed Cosimo's policy in Tuscan, and marked a turning point and the start of a new era in the process of rebuilding within the city and of modifying its buildings in accordance with modern tastes.

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