Orto e Museo Botanico

This guide to the Orto e Museo Botanico in Pisa starts with physician Luca Ghini pressing a dried leaf onto paper and writing its name beside it, a cheap trick that became the herbarium. It follows the 1543 deal that brought Ghini to teach at the University of Pisa, on condition that Grand Duke Cosimo the First fund a garden of medicinal simples, at a time when a mislabeled root sold by an apothecary could kill a patient and ruin a shop. You'll hear how his method spread across Europe and why the garden itself moved twice before settling on this spot in 1591. Walk the beds slowly; they're still laid out the way a sixteenth-century apothecary would recognize.