Guida
• Giugno 2025
Fort Belvedere
Autore: Valentina Zucchi
Editore: Officina Libraria
Lingue di traduzione: italiano>inglese
Traduttori: Sarah E. Cree - Il Nuovo Traduttore Letterario
Aggiungiamo al nostro portfolio un’altra guida d’arte, stavolta dedicata a un gioiello della nostra città: il Forte di Belvedere, che domina lo skyline delle colline di Firenze.
Fortezza militare del Rinascimento, dal secondo dopoguerra sede privilegiata di mostre, cultura e svago, anche grazie all’impareggiabile vista che offre sulla città.
Un piccolo ma pregiato volume scritto dalla storica dell’arte Valentina Zucchi e pubblicato da Officinalibraria, uno dei nostri clienti più fedeli e prestigiosi.
Con il sostegno di Musefirenze, che da anni assistiamo nelle pubblicazioni dedicate ai Musei civici fiorentini.
E con la traduzione specializzata della nostra storica dell’arte Sarah Cree.
Leggi un estratto di traduzione!
In the Beginning it was a Belvedere
In February 1550, Duchess Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de’ Medici, purchased the Pitti
residence and garden from the heirs of Luca Pitti. The sale included a vast hilly area, originally
earmarked for rural use, bordering the old fourteenth-century walls. This area extended up to the
powerful new bastioned Oltrarno front, a modern defensive line set back from the old walls, ordered
by Duke Cosimo I in 1545 to ensure efficient defence of the southern parts of the city. Cosimo and
Eleonora continued to invest in the surrounding land in subsequent years, eventually incorporating
numerous other holdings, including the old, original Boboli estate, which ended up passing on its
special name to the entire future Medici garden. While most of the land continued to be used for
farming and production, the dukes had something else in mind for the steep terrain around the old
Pitti residence. In 1550, architect Niccolò Pericoli, known as il Tribolo, was hired to restore form
and beauty to a neglected and partly abandoned green space, transforming it into the first section of
one of the most innovative gardens in sixteenth-century Europe. Work to create the new space
advanced up the hill all the way to the old walls. Over time, the walls had lost some of their original
height and configuration in view of defence upgrades. These include the modifications made by
Michelangelo Buonarroti during the Siege of Florence between 1529 and 1530. More or less erupting
ridges of packed earth in the shape of ramparts, technically called ‘cavaliers’, rest along and follow
the outline of the walls, which were originally intended to house batteries needed for both offence
and defence. One of them, possibly the legendary cavalier of Malatesta, from which Captain
Malatesta Baglioni fired his magnificent arquebus during the intense hours of the siege (fig. 1), is a
splendid, elevated platform offering panoramic views of the countryside and city, a feature for which
it influenced the future plans of Duke Cosimo and his architects. This artificial terrace, which is
approximately eleven metres high, arranged around a section of the fourteenth-century walls both
within the ducal property and outward, and facing the road coming from the San Giorgio Gate,
became Cosimo’s chosen site for a structure entirely devoted to the view: the ‘loggia di Belvedere’
(Belvedere Loggia). The construction of this loggia is first mentioned in the account books in May
1568, and work was begun under the direct supervision of the duke, the project being ‘something
very dear to His Excellency, since he comes there every day and presses for it often’. 1 Construction
of the loggia thus played a key role in Duke Cosimo’s meditative and melancholic old age, choosing,
upon his elevation to the higher rank of grand duke (August 1569), to prepare himself a refuge at the
top of the Boboli Hill, where looking means loving, possessing and controlling the city below.
