A short walk from the Accademia Gallery and the church of San Marco, the Giardino dei Semplici occupies a quiet corner of central Florence, its rows of beds and greenhouses tracing a history of scientific study that stretches back nearly five hundred years.
Plants as medicine
The garden's origins lie in the medieval link between botany and medicine. From the Middle Ages, "semplici" – a term derived from the medieval Latin medicamentum simplex, meaning medicinal herbs – were grown in dedicated gardens to supply remedies. An early figure in this tradition was Matteo Silvatico, a physician of the Salernitan medical school active between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, whose compendium of plant properties, the Liber cibalis et medicinalis Pandectarum, was an influential reference work; teaching gardens of this kind trained medical students to identify and use plant species correctly.
Founded by Cosimo I, 1545
Building on this tradition, Duke Cosimo I de' Medici established an academic garden attached to the study of medicine in Florence, intended to let students combine classroom teaching with direct observation of living plants. The garden's official founding date is 1 December 1545, when a lease was agreed with Dominican nuns of San Domenico del Maglio, who provided land in an area known as "Cafaggio", close to the Medici stables designed by Michelozzo. The Florence garden followed close on the founding of comparable university gardens at Pisa and Padua in the same decade, and today it is recognised as the second-oldest botanical garden in the world still occupying its original site.
A model for other gardens
The garden's early layout, with its geometric beds designed to present plant species clearly for study, became an influential model, and its methods are recorded as having shaped the design of later botanical gardens founded in Pisa, Pavia and Bologna. A notably favourable microclimate, sheltered from cold northerly winds and well exposed to the sun, allowed the garden to sustain an unusually wide range of species from its earliest years, including some that would not otherwise survive Florence's climate.
The garden today
The Giardino dei Semplici is now part of the University of Florence's Museum of Natural History, covering around 2.3 hectares with roughly 1,700 square metres of greenhouse space and a collection exceeding 5,000 plant specimens. Its grounds still contain historic specimens, including a cork oak planted in 1805 and a yew tree dating from 1720, alongside twenty-one large geometric beds and dedicated collections of orchids, succulents, carnivorous plants and cycads housed in the climate-controlled greenhouses. Visitors today walk paths largely unchanged in outline since the Renaissance, among plants and structures that connect the garden to nearly five centuries of continuous scientific use.
The garden's location, close to the Accademia Gallery and the Museo di San Marco, places it firmly within Florence's central museum district today.