Of course, I remember my first visit to Florence, with its streets like deep canyons – sun-heated stone and dazzling light on one side, coolness and black shade on the other. And everywhere, tempting archways that lead the inquisitive pedestrian into mysterious courtyards. In the years since, I’ve been lucky enough to explore quite a few of these places. One, however, remained unknown to me until recently. This archway off the Via Giorgio La Pira, north of the city centre, ushers you in to Florence’s botanical museum, one of its lesser-known treasures, the great collection now forming part of the Natural History Museum.
The building assumed its present form at the end of the 19th century, when the old grand-ducal stables beside the botanical garden were given two additional storeys in order to house the collections of flora. Before this they had been held in the world’s first public museum of science, the resoundingly named Imperial-Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History (more recently known as La Specola, near the Palazzo Pitti), founded in 1771.
The climb to the second floor is worth the effort. You are immediately surrounded by extraordinary objects: a cycad, several feet high and resembling an enormous pine cone, is displayed just inside the door, near a suggestively shaped coco-de-mer, a two-lobed nut. It soon becomes clear that this is very much a working museum; desks are covered in files and laboratory equipment, while the staff are constantly busy.
In the rooms beyond can be found the 18th- and 19th-century wax models produced in the officina di ceroplastica, then attached to the museum. The best-known sculptor of this material was Clemente Susini (1754-1814), notable today for his remarkable anatomical waxes still on display at La Specola, which are exquisitely detailed and surprisingly beautiful (or appallingly gruesome, according to taste). However, he and others (particularly Luigi Calamai and Egisto Tortori) were also commissioned to produce perfect replicas of flowers, fruit and fungi, as well as highly enlarged models of botanical structure.
They have recently been restored by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the city’s institute famous for the conservation of artworks. There are also drawers holding wax models of plant structures, used for teaching, as well as life-size replicas of citrus prepared from plaster casts of real fruit grown in the nearby Boboli Gardens. These are mounted on their original bases, which resemble cake stands. Each also has its original label attached, and the vividly descriptive names (for example Limon pomum Adamii, distortum et digitatum) predate the modern Linnaean method. This earlier system of nomenclature had been devised by Giovanni Battista Ferrari in the mid-17th century; attempting to categorise the huge numbers of weird hybrid forms of citrus, he gave them the charming generic name of frutte che scherzano, or ‘joking fruit’.
The study of plants in Florence had really begun a century earlier, in 1545, when Cosimo I de’ Medici established the Giardino dei Semplici (Garden of Simples, or medicinal plants). The botanist he appointed as its director, Luca Ghini, is thought to have been the first person to dry plants under pressure and mount them on paper, thus creating a hortus siccus (dry garden), or, as we now know it, herbarium. Today the museum holds two of the world’s oldest herbariums, one made by Abbot Merini in the 1540s and a major collection gathered by Andrea Cesalpino around 1563.
During the 17th and 18th centuries most ‘dry gardens’ were to be found in private hands. It was only in 1842 that the Sicilian botanist Filippo Parlatore proposed and founded the Herbarium Centrale Italicum, which brought together collections from all across Italy, uniting them in La Specola. One of the most significant was a huge bequest from Philip Barker Webb, an English botanist who occupied many years collecting around the Mediterranean and the Near East. In 1850 he left his library and his entire collection of some 250,000 specimens to the Grand Duke Leopold II to be incorporated in the museum. With the over arching title of the Herbarium Universitatis Florentinae, they are stored in the museum’s principal rooms.
These are lined with cabinets containing huge numbers of paper folders filled with dried specimens. Each sheet is labelled with information recording precisely where the plant was found, the nature of its habitat and other information, while attached is a small envelope containing seeds and other fragments. About five million plant specimens are stored here. It is one of the world’s largest herbariums and attracts researchers from around the globe. They may, for example, come to identify plants – a huge number of varieties are preserved here, often the first examples ever discovered in the wild; they have been given a modern botanical name, which helps when comparing new discoveries. Nowadays it is also possible to extract DNA from preserved specimens, allowing precise analysis of the relationships between species.
Above the cabinets hang large still life paintings of fruits and vegetables. Most are by Bartolomeo Bimbi, the court painter to Grand Duke Cosimo III. They are works of great beauty and rigorous accuracy, several showing the stranger forms of citrus fruit for which the Medici had a fascination, and which they cultivated in their gardens at Villa di Castello and elsewhere. Curiously, there seems to have been a horticultural gene in the Medici bloodline. Certainly a passion for plants and gardening was passed down from father to son over several generations. In 1716 during the rule of Cosimo III the Società Botanica Fiorentina was formed, the first of its kind in the world. The grand duke also commis sioned Pier Antonio Micheli, the society’s founder, to undertake botanical expeditions in Tuscany, then across Italy.
By 1878 the museum had started to outgrow its home in La Specola, and it was felt appropriate that its floral collections be brought closer to the Giardino dei Semplici. In 1990 the botanical section became part of the Natural History Museum of the University of Florence. It would have given great satisfaction to all who contributed to this astonishing collection over hundreds of years to know that their remarkable legacy is being so well maintained and is still so highly valued.
Florence’s botanical museum in the Museo di Storia Naturale, 4 Via Giorgio La Pira, 50121 Florence
A version of this story appeared in the February 2017 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive reviews of the best exhibitions around the world, direct to your inbox
