Bardini Gardens

Giardino Bardini tickets: the garden’s own €10 entry

The Giardino Bardini sells its own tickets, at the ticket office or online through the villa’s shop on Vivaticket. It’s run by a private foundation, the Fondazione Parchi Monumentali Bardini e Peyron, and isn’t a state museum, so its prices and free-entry rules are its own: the garden costs €10, or €5 reduced, and nothing on its site asks you to book a time.

Who pays what depends on nationality as well as age. Under-6s go in free whatever their passport, and EU citizens go in free up to 17, while visitors aged 6 to 17 from outside the EU pay €5. EU citizens aged 18 to 24 pay €5 too, and so do families of up to five with at least one child under 17.

Disabled visitors and one companion go in free, and so do residents of Florence, Arezzo and Grosseto. The villa at the top of the garden puts on exhibitions with tickets of their own, but the last one, Firenze ‘50 ‘60 ‘70, closed on 18 October, and nothing was open in the exhibition timetable when we looked.

Bardini Gardens with the Firenze Card: entry included

The Firenze Card, Florence’s official museum card, includes the Bardini among its 60 or so museums, and the garden lists cardholders as visitors who don’t pay. There’s nothing to book with the card: its page for the Bardini Villa and Garden says no reservation is required. The booking rules you may read about for “the Bardini” belong to the Museo Stefano Bardini, a separate museum.

The garden counts on the card as a €10 entry, one of the cheaper ones, so it won’t carry the card on its own. The card starts paying off at around five or six paid museums, and with the Uffizi and the Accademia alone it doesn’t. Put your own list into Firenze Card and Florence’s other passes and it does the sums, gardens included.

If you’re seeing Palazzo Pitti as well, the Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens pass, from €40.50, includes the Bardini Gardens too, with reserved entry to the palace museums and the Boboli and an audio guide app.

Bardini Gardens opening hours and the Monday closings

The winter day at the Bardini is short, and the last entry is an hour before closing, so in late autumn you need to be through the gate by 15:00. Around the start of November the garden was open from 10:00 to 16:00.

On top of that, it closes on the first and last Monday of every month, all year round, and the next closing days are 30 November and 7 and 28 December 2026. In spring and summer the garden closes later, though we couldn’t confirm those times when we looked.

The three gardens of the Giardino Bardini

Stefano Bardini called it “the three gardens”, and its four hectares under the medieval walls, between Costa San Giorgio and Borgo San Niccolò, still divide that way. In the middle is the Italian garden, where the Baroque stairway drops straight down the hill between the lawn terraces, with Florence spread out ahead of you.

On one side lies the English wood, which the villa describes as a rare example of an Anglo-Chinese garden. On the other is the farm park, with the orchard, the vegetable plots and the wisteria pergola.

Along the paths you pass about 200 pieces of sculpture, 13 fountains, three grottoes and a wall of fountains. The garden sits on a steep slope, so wear shoes you’re happy to climb in, and when you want a break, the Bardini Loggetta, a café and restaurant inside the garden, is the place to stop and sit. If you can pick your month, go in April or May for the azaleas, peonies and wisteria, or in June for the irises.

Stefano Bardini and the villa above the garden

The villa at the top of the garden began in 1641 as the Villa Manadora, designed by Gherardo Silvani for Francesco Manadori on top of a medieval building, and later took the name Villa Belvedere. Each 19th-century owner left something: Le Blanc laid out the Anglo-Chinese garden that is now the English wood, the Mozzi took over in 1839, and from 1880 the Carolath von Beuthen planted roses and camellias.

In 1913 Stefano Bardini (1836 to 1922) bought the property, and the statues and fountains you walk among are the ones he added. When Ugo Bardini died in 1965 with no heirs, he left it to the Swiss Confederation, which turned it down, and in 1987 it passed to the Italian state. The foundation that runs it today was created in 1998. The garden reopened in 2005, the year the wisteria pergola went up, and the villa followed in 2007.

Getting to the Bardini Gardens: the walk up from Ponte Vecchio

The simplest way in is on foot. From Ponte Vecchio you walk uphill along Costa San Giorgio to the main entrance at number 2, and the second entrance is at Via dei Bardi 1r.

The Costa San Giorgio entrance isn’t a way into the Boboli, even though the two gardens are neighbours, so plan to go in at each garden’s own gate. Coming by car is harder for now: the Forte Belvedere car park nearby is closed while the city works on it.