backed, however, consolidated that interpretation of the city as a scenic space that had already been introduced in Cosimo’s time. The Pitti Palace complex in particular has this capacity, and it was to this site that Ferdinand I, reigning from 1587 to 1609, definitively moved the grand ducal residence. Under Ferdinand, the Vasari Corridor was extended to the palace, so as to connect it seamlessly with the previous ducal seat, now called the Palazzo Vecchio and used as the seats of government bodies and magistrates. The settlement of the court in Palazzo Pitti required enlargements and modifications. The first enlargement, carried out during the reign of Cosimo II (1609-1621), extended the main structure of the palace nearly doubling its length. The second expansion, ordered by Ferdinando II (1621-1670), added the lower side wings to the façade, transforming the already huge fifteenth-century building into a complex of enormous dimensions, imposing itself on the urban fabric with a leap in scale comparable only to that of the cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore..
The extension of the palace was accompanied by projects and works for the realignment and enlargement of the square in front of it, complicated by the difference in height between the Via Romana, at the base of the large widening, and the height of the palace. The square was increasingly configured as a ceremonial space, a monumental urban void that suddenly expands from the narrow spaces of the medieval city.
On the opposite side of the palace, the Boboli Gardens also underwent transformation and extension. The Palazzina Belvedere, built by Cosimo at the top of the garden and then transformed with the construction of the ramparts into a sort of fortified villa – the fort of S. Giorgio or Belvedere (1590-95) – was already a subdivision of this green space. The addition of new land on the southern side, backed by Cosimo II and then by Ferdinando II, then rotated the orientation of the garden by 90 degrees, which now crossed the line of the sixteenth-century fortifications, still clearly visible today, occupying the entire space between the back of the houses on Via Romana and the walls. This very large space, crossed by a long avenue, is marked by a series of squares divided by secondary paths and occupied by groves, reproducing the logic of urban blocks in a natural context. Statues, fountains, pools, small buildings and an amphitheatre that exploits the shape of the natural slope behind the palace enriched the garden, creating the landmarks on which paths and perspectives converge.
Boboli embodied the ideal of a Baroque space that seventeenth-century Florence otherwise expressed only marginally, in the breathtaking constructions for festivities and pageants that now used the Arno as an urban theatre, or in the Medici Villa of Poggio Imperiale, rebuilt in the 1720s as a dramatic backdrop to a long road overlooking the slope of a hill outside the gate of San Pier Gattolini. The courtly and scenic role of Via Maggio, a short distance from Palazzo Pitti, where members of the court settled or renovated their residences as early as the second half of the sixteenth century, was also heightened. The dignity of the street was underscored by the new design of the feature that concludes it, the bridge at Santa Trinita, adorned with four statues at its entrances for the marriage of Cosimo II to Maria Maddalena of Austria (1608). Finally, mention must be made of the construction of the Chapel of the Princes, the great Medici mausoleum at the back of the church of San Lorenzo, commissioned by Cosimo and built during the seventeenth century. The chapel does not alter the urban layout of the area, but its large dome constitutes a further distinctive element of the city panorama, now characterised by a series of taller structures and visual references.