Giardino di Boboli

Despite the volumes of visitors and a slightly shop-worn mien, the Boboli gardens remain both a marvel of Tuscan Renaissance landscape architecture and, in its further reaches, a fine escape from the tourist hordes. Perhaps its most impressive feature is the stately VialedeiCipressi, a grand, cypress-lined avenue that leads down to Isolotto, a marvellous ornamental pond adorned with a marble Neptune and nymphs and, in warmer weather, fragrant citrus trees. Nearer the Palazzo Pitti, a fleshy Venus by Giambologna rises from the waves in the Grotta del Buontalenti, a fanciful grotto designed by the eponymous artist. Don’t miss the haunting ‘face’ sculpture (1998) by Polish sculptor Igor Mitoraj (b 1944), located near the top of the Viale dei Cipressi. It seems to grow out of the garden itself. And if you head straight uphill from the Palazzo Pitti, past a Renaissance amphitheatre and menagerie of ancient Roman and baroque sculpture, you eventually reach the Museodelle Porcellane (admission included), home to the Sèvres, Meissen, and Wedgewood collected by the Palazzo Pitti’s wealthy tenants. The museum’s terrace also offers fine prospects across the Tuscan countryside south of Florence.