When Cosimo de Medici married Eleonora di Toledo in 1549, she bought the Pitti Palace for the family. However, the palace lacked adequate pleasure grounds, so Eleonora had the Boboli Gardens laid out on the hill behind the palace. Over the next two centuries, the gardens were built, revised, enlarged, and filled with sculptures.

One can see the Boboli Gardens from the far side of the Arno on which we spent all of our brief time when we were in Florence in 2007. Of the Italian cities we (and a pile of Northwestern High School students) visited then, Florence was the one to which Julian and I were longing to return, and that vista of the Boboli Gardens across the Arno was among our primary reasons.

On the morning of our second day in Florence, we got up early and headed to the gardens.

One gets into the Boboli Gardens by buying a ticket at the ticket office in the Pitti Palace. They sell several "levels" of tickets there; make sure you know what parts of the Palace and grounds your ticket is good for. Do not let the cashier or the person behind you rush you into paying before you're clear on what your ticket is buying.

There is a map of the Boboli Gardens available here, and you'll want to pick a map up from the cashier; the Gardens are huge, and it would be easy to miss something really wonderful while accidentally visiting some other part of the Gardens three times.

By late afternoon, my feet were getting a bit tired, and when Julian suggested we go to the Porcelain Museum at the top of the Gardens, I tried to beg off, on the grounds that (a) there was bound to be plenty of porcelain inside the Pitti Palace, where we were going the next day, and (b) we'd already walked up the Boboli hill and back at least three times. However, he talked me into it.

Thank goodness he did. The porcelain collection (mostly Napoleon's) was amazing, but the view from the garden in front of the Porcelain Museum would have been worth the climb even if the museum had been closed.

Finally, footsore but happy, we headed back to dinner and our hotel.

The Pitti Palace from the bell tower of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore, with the Boboli Gardens climbing the hill behind the Palace.

The next day, we treked back over the Ponte Vecchio to tour the Pitti Palace.

Silly me, I thought I'd seen most of the great art in Florence because I'd been to the Uffizi.

The Pitti Palace was built by Lucca Pitti, but was purchased in 1549 by Eleonora di Toledo, the wife of Cosimo de Medici. The Medici's nearly doubled the original size of the palace, and proceeded to fill it with Renaissance art. I would say that approximately half the great art in Florence is in the Uffizi. The other half is in the Pitti Palace, along with much of the furnishings of the Medici's and of Napoleon, who took over the Palace when he took over Italy in the early 19th Century.

An oddity of the art in the Pitti Palace: It does not seem to be nearly as well-catalogued as one would expect. True, the art is arranged throughout the palace approximately as it may have been arranged when people actually lived there, but there seems to be no comprehensive listing of the art in each room available to the visiting public, and the docents in the Palace often have no idea of the title, artist, or even the approximate date of many of the works on display. The more famous artists' works are identified, but there are some lovely things unlabeled.

Alas, photography is forbidden within the Pitti Palace.

Still to come, as soon as I can get them up:

• the rest of our week in Florence;
• a two-day trip to Pisa; and
• saying goodbye to Innsbruck.
• Interestingly, as of July 13th, we have a guest student who is experiencing his first visit to the U.S. I would love to get a record of his impressions of the U.S. and South Carolina.