Would you like to discover something more about how people of Florence spend their free time, where they meet up for a walk, a bike ride, a Sunday pic-nic or a football match?

In Florence, the best place where you can do all that is the mysterious and romantic fluvial park of Cascine, very close to the city centre.

With me you will get to know pieces of history which have never been told to those who don’t come here; you’ll be told about the park’s birth as a hunting reserve and farm of Medici family, about its opening as a public park (one of the most ancient in Italy!) thanks to the Grand Duke Lorena, through monuments and villas, and its particular urban placement, till the Universal Exhibition in 1861. But this is not all!

Did you know that the Quercione field inspired the writer Collodi in that part of his novel “Pinocchio” when the Cat and the Fox try to leave behind the poor wooden puppet? And did you know that on the 28th of February 1894 the park quiet was violated by the blast of the first motor car? And that in 1870 the Indian prince Rajaran Chuttraputti Maharajah from Kolhapur was cremated just here, at the confluence of the river Arno with the creek Mugnone where you can still find an extraordinary little temple in his memory?

But this is not enough yet! Every corner of this park keeps a story, a secret, or simply let us loose in a fantastic natural landscape among the birds tweeting and the squirrels run.