The Cascine in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: a context for Frangois-Xavier Fabre's View of Florence from the Cascine

摘要

Originally a Medici reserve for hunting and dairy farming, the extensive park known as the Cascine deLTIsola, immediately to the west of Florence on the north bank of the Arno (figures 1—3), evolved during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries tobecome a royal estate in which farms and vineyards coexisted with designed landscapes planted with trees and shrubs and interspersed with fountains, walks and meadows. In 1771, in L'antiquario fiorentino, the Florentine writer and editor Gaetano Cambiagidescribed the Cascine as containing 'extensive grassland and pleasant groves with many walks'.1 Those groves and meadows provided bucolic retreats to which the Medici and Habsburg-Lorraine Grand Dukes could retire with their families and courtiers and escape from the constrictions of the city and the formality of the court. For much of the eighteenth century, the Grand Dukes permitted select visitors to Florence to enjoy the amenities of the Cascine, and by the end of the century it was broadly accessible to travellers and to residents of Florence. Early in the nineteenth century, Grand Duchess Elisa Bonaparte opened the park to the public. Ferdinando III continued this practice after his restoration as Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1814.