Giardino della Gherardesca, Renaissance garden in central Florence, Italy.

The Giardino della Gherardesca is Florence's largest private garden, bordered by Via Gino Capponi, Via Giuseppe Giusti, Borgo Pinti and Viale Matteotti, with its main entrance on Piazzale Donatello. Giuseppe Poggi designed the monumental entrance on Viale Matteotti, a stone arch with a coffered vault and iron gate, flanked by two lower buildings. Inside are an Ionic temple by Giuseppe Cacialli, a tepidarium of 1837, a fountain with a putto, and centuries-old trees including a large maple, a sequoia and a giant thuja.

The garden was built between 1472 and 1480 for Bartolommeo Scala and later passed to the Medici family through Cardinal Alessandro de Medici. After World War Two, landscape architect Pietro Porcinai restored it and it remains Florence's largest private garden today.

The garden shows how Florentine aristocratic families connected their homes with carefully designed green spaces. The layout with temples and water features reflects Renaissance ideas about bringing nature and architecture together.

Public access is limited to an open day held in December by Four Seasons; the rest of the year the grounds serve hotel guests. The main entrance is the monumental arch by Giuseppe Poggi at piazzale Donatello 11, flanked by the doorways at numbers 10 and 12. Two marble plaques above those side entrances record the 1810 garden and the 1873 construction of the entrance.

The garden's oldest trees are still standing: a maple of notable size, a sequoia and a giant thuja, survivors of the 18th-century English layout. The first mandarins grown in Florence were cultivated here, among the botanical rarities that made the garden known.