To visit Boboli Gardens is to connect with the essence of Italy. Even for jaded Florentines, the gardens rising up the hill behind the ponderous Pitti Palace are a graceful escape from the treeless and congested Renaissance city. Or, rather, they were.
Now they are a grand delusion or, as the Italians say a "presa in giro".
To begin with, tourists must pay €4. Fair enough, one could argue, but even the gardens of Versailles cost just €3 and only from late March to October. Boboli demands cash year-round.
For the money - at least in early June - visitors can see weeds, dusty shrubs,barren lawns, a few desultory flowers, bottle caps floating in the fountains and, upon reaching the hilltop, a splendid view of the Tuscan countryside and Florence's iconic skyline. Versailles' gardens, many times larger, offer no grand distant vistas but have everything else the Italian gardens don't - human caring, imagination, flora.
Instead of embodying cultural refinement and grace, the Boboli Gardens now symbolise government ineptitude, the tendency to live upon reputation and the country's growing inability to compete with less well endowed but less tired tourist economies.
One €4 scrawny garden does not a disaster make. But frustration and growing doubts that the lure of Florence, if not Italy, is waning had begun to set in just before my Boboli visit, during a lunchtime meal at Omero. The trattoria is a favourite among Florentines. Perched on a hill at Arcetri a few kilometres outside Florence, its postcard perfect views of the countryside are a reminder that the Tuscan high-life - the villas, the cypresses, the better restaurants and the better-kept Renaissance gardens, such as at the Villa d'Olmo at Castello - is more easily found outside the city walls than within.
To work up a proper appetite for Omero, walk there. From the Ponte Vecchio (a good 45 minutes uphill), take Costa di San Giorgio past the house where Galileo once lived, beyond the restored (finally) Belvedere Castle, with the graceful San Miniato church off to the east and Brunelleschi's Duomo to your back, past a former residence of Tchaikovsky, across Viale Michelangelo and up straight into Tuscan hill bliss towards Arcetri.
Even at the trattoria, however, there were Boboli signals. Although well-known to Florentines, the restaurant was nearly empty. And while the food was quite good, it was not as good or varied as on several previous visits. Worse yet was the tab: €102 for two, with a half-bottle of the cheapest Chianti. Not much less than a good restaurant in New York. Five years earlier, the bill would have been little more than 102,000 lire or €53.
Like practically all restaurants in Italy, Omero has become vastly more expensive since the euro replaced the lira in 2002. Restaurateurs devised a devious trick. Since €1 was worth a little less than 2,000 lire, an 8,000 lire pizza, say, was converted to cost €6. Customers pay "6" instead of "8". Va bene, no?
The con, luckily, has not been propagated as viciously at hotels, which are too reliant upon bookings by thrifty tour operators to attempt to pull off such a trick.
Still, the smarter hotels in Italy, and particularly in Florence, have not been shy about raising prices. And here again, one encounters the Boboli syndrome.
Florentine hotels suffer from cramped quarters, imposed by the city's ancient architecture and cannot offer much natural light, let alone views. Particularly in the past five years, however, many three- and four-star hotels have revamped their interiors before raising their prices.
The Hotel Baglioni, for example, once a granddame of the city, greatly improved its dowdy image made worse by the steady degradation of its immediate neighbourhood near the train station. For €258 (high season) and a copious breakfast in the vast, elegant rooftop restaurant, one gets a handsome, mahogany bedecked roomy double - with a view of the station. Many rooms look out on a dreary courtyard.
Until recently, most of the city's top-class hotels were well outside the centre - notably the ultra-elegant 45-room converted monastery Villa San Michele in Fiesole (double room rates €827-€986, junior suites €1,190-€1,598) and the Villa La Vedetta, close to town with an equally spectacular view of the city (doublescost €561-€869, suites €957-€1,859).
Recently, several top-class hotels have opened within the city. JK Place, on dowdy Piazza Santa Maria Novella, and Ferragamo-owned Continentale, at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio, have both received rave reviews over the past year. Few of the 20 rooms at JK Place (doubles €315-€470) have stunning views, though they all have good natural light, but it appears to be more warm and homey than the slightly pretentiously cool Continentale.
The newest and grandest addition is the Relais Santa Croce, situated in the less touristy and more residential part of town and yet only two streets from the magnificent church.
Few of the 24 tastefully modern rooms in the splendidly restored 18th century palace offer a memorable view. Unlike Villa Vedetta and San Michele, there is no pool with drop-dead panoramas either. But for €420 to €480 a night, the just-opened hotel appears to be a relative bargain, for Florence. (Spectacular suites go from €890 to €1,800.)
However, there is yet another aspect of the Boboli syndrome. At the hotel restaurant meals cost upward of €120. Given that some of the investors in the hotel, according to locals, are the proprietors of the Michelin three-star Enoteca Pinchiorri, the food must be quite good. But the pricing reeks of Bobolism - since you have come all the way to Florence, you're stuck here and we can make you pay dearly for whatever it is you need.
Instead, I strolled over for one of Italy's simplest pleasures - espresso and pastries - at Patrizio Cosi, a local café on Borgo Albizi, five minutes from Santa Croce. Two cream-filled croissants later, two Bobolisms had been pleasantly neutralised.
Still, a bit of the bloom is off the Florentine rose. Granted, the city is slightly cleaner and the traffic less chaotic in the city centre than 15 years ago (although many Florentines will dispute that impression). Like many cities in Italy, notably Rome and Venice, Florence has cleaned up and restored many of its most important sites, although much of that effort occurred in the run-up to the 2000 Jubilee in Rome.
But the city's worsening finances, not to mention the Italian national government's, threaten to undo the progress. Rome recently announced spending cuts for all things cultural. The country's 20 regional governments, meanwhile, are also cutting back in many areas despite raising taxes. Silvano Gori, Florence's councillor in charge of tourism, jokes: "Most of my budget goes to keeping the tourist bathrooms clean."
Gori is seeking to promote more cultural events, such as concerts, outside the peak tourism season. But few Italian companies spend significantly on cultural sponsorship. Last June, Florence entertained hopes that its Maggio Musicale orchestra could knock Milan's La Scala off its pedestal as Italy's musical champion when Riccardo Muti quit La Scala and asked Maggio Musicale to tour with him in Libya. In September, however, the orchestra was placed under the Italian equivalent of bankruptcy proceedings and faces deep spending cuts.
Global competition from newer tourist hot spots, from Croatia to Thailand, also threaten to undermine the middle-level tourism, namely tours, that fuels much of Florence's economy. Hotels in the city are so desperate to retain tour operators inclined to send their customers to Asia that they offer them 70 per cent discounts or more, says one long-time travel agent in Florence. "And as a result, even more hotels are finding even more ways to skim off taxes if they want to make a living."
No place will ever take away the cultural wonders of Florence and of the rest of Italy, so there is little risk of even a mild collapse in tourism. But it is also true that Italian governments have greatly ignored the development of the country's cultural heritage.
For example, it has been patently clear for many years that the city needs to build a large museum on its outskirts to house the overflow of great works from the Uffizi and the Accademia, among others, where tourists in peak season spend up to 3 hours outdoors waiting to squeeze in, only to find many rooms closed. (Tourists can book ahead, but so many Bobolisms appear that the price of the regular €6.25 ticket can nearly triple if one tries to book online or through a hotel concierge.) The country cannot afford to build such a museum even if such an idea were ever accepted.
Then again, the country cannot afford not to build new homes for all its art. As with the Boboli, Italy has to learn to tend its garden.
