Botanical Garden

The Botanical Garden of Pisa was founded in 1543 at the explicit request of Luca Ghini, a physician and botanist from Imola. Summoned by Cosimo I de’ Medici as a professor at the University of Pisa, he accepted only on the condition that he could establish a university “Garden of Simples”. Thus, in Pisa, near the banks of the Arno, the oldest university botanical garden in the world was created.
The Garden later changed location twice: in 1563 through the work of Andrea Cesalpino, a pupil of Luca Ghini, and in 1591 (its current site, close to the world-famous Piazza dei Miracoli) through the work of Giuseppe Casabona. Covering an area of about two hectares, it cultivates approximately 3.000 plants from all over the world.
This great green lung of the city is a magical place, rich in picturesque corners, such as the bamboo grove or the pond with lotus flowers and water lilies. Inside the Garden there is also the Botanical Museum, housed in the rooms of the building known as the “Palazzo delle Conchiglie,” so called because of its facade entirely decorated in grotesque style in 1752.
Heir to the Gallery established by Ferdinando I in 1591, which at the time allowed access to the Botanical Garden from Via Santa Maria, it preserves the Picture Gallery, the monumental entrance portal of the gallery, the ancient “Studiolo” for the Garden’s seeds, as well as objects connected with the teaching of university botany, including valuable wax and plaster models and educational panels.

Info: Botanical Garden and Museum, Sistema museale dell'Ateneo di Pisa

Its first location was along the city’s Lungarno, near the present-day Arsenali Medicei; it was then moved behind the Monastery of Santa Marta, before finding a definitive location under Ferdinando I in its current site (around 1590), introduced by a fine eighteenth-century façade decorated in the grotesque style, heir to the Gallery founded by Grand Duke Ferdinando I in 1591.

Curiosity: one of the most important directors of the Pisan Botanical Garden was Andrea Cesalpino, a pupil of Ghini, who enriched the collection with species from the Americas and Asia. His work of classification, De Plantis, is considered the foundation of modern systematic botany. His most important discoveries, however, were linked to the study of the heart and the movement of blood: going against Aristotelian notions, he demonstrated that blood circulation had the heart as its sole driving force, and not the liver.

The great magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) located in the section known as the Orto del Cedro, together with a maidenhair tree (Ginkgo biloba) planted in the same area, is the oldest tree in the garden, where it has been growing since 1787, and is considered the first of its species to have been introduced into Tuscany. A large cavity has destroyed about half of the wood down to the roots, leaving the tree dangerously unbalanced right at its base. The close attention with which it is monitored and the care it receives are justified by historical reasons: in fact, its “misadventures” began well before the onset of the cavity and not long after its planting in the garden. In 1789 a severe cold spell caused it to dry out, but as early as 1798 the tree managed to produce its first flowers. Despite its many ordeals and the serious mutilation, the plant is very vigorous and flowers and bears fruit abundantly every year.

The Botanical Garden is organized, predominantly according to historical criteria, into seven sectors. Each sector hosts one or more collections arranged on a scientific basis. Among the most important collections are: the arboretum, which hosts very diverse tree species, including interesting specimens of conifers; the geophytes collection, which brings together more than 200 species of plants with persistent underground organs; the systematic collection, consisting of 400 species arranged according to a systematic criterion in 48 flowerbeds; the hydrophytarium, a collection of aquatic species typical of Italian wetlands, particularly those of northern Tuscany; dune plants, a reconstruction of the dune ecosystem from the shoreline to the areas behind the dunes; medicinal plants, numbering about 120 species, organized according to their uses on the basis of the active principles they contain; Salvia, bringing together 100 species of the genus Salvia from all over the world; the banana greenhouse, consisting of tropical species of food interest, arranged according to a geographical criterion; the succulent greenhouse, dedicated to about 200 species of succulents from the various desert and pre-desert areas of the planet; the tropical greenhouse, composed of about 150 shrub and tree species from the warm intertropical regions of the four continents, arranged according to geographical criteria; the Victoria greenhouse, which houses Victoria cruziana, a distinctive water lily from South America, and other hydrophytes from tropical climates; the ancient camellias collection, consisting of 30 plants of ornamental and historical interest; and the bamboo groves, located in two different sectors of the garden with the species Phyllostachys edulis and P. nigra.

The Botanical Museum contains seven exhibition rooms arranged over two floors. In the first room, in addition to the portrait of the founder of the Botanical Garden, Luca Ghini, visitors can admire the ancient late sixteenth-century walnut-carved door that once stood at the entrance to the Garden of Simples in Via Santa Maria. The second room houses a small reconstruction of the sixteenth-century Wunderkammer that had been created in the very building that now houses the Museum, some original items of which are preserved at the Museum of Natural History of the University of Pisa at the Certosa di Pisa.
The third room hosts the historical collection of portraits of semplicisti, naturalists, and directors of the Garden, and displays the Catalogus Plantarum Horti Pisani by Michelangelo Tilli (1723). The fourth room is entirely dedicated to Gaetano Savi, prefect of the Garden and director of the Botanical Museum at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The fifth room displays splendid nineteenth-century wax models, with particular emphasis on fungi, produced by the ceroplastic school of Luigi Calamai, as well as the original model depicting the fertilization of the pumpkin, which was used in Pisa in 1839 by Giovanni Battista Amici to illustrate his discoveries during the first meeting of Italian scientists.
The sixth room is dedicated to Teodoro Caruel and Giovanni Arcangeli, directors of the Garden at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and features some samples and preparations of fiber plants purchased at the Colonial Exhibition of Marseille in 1906. The seventh room is dedicated to herbaria and nineteenth-century educational panels.

Last update: 29/01/2026