Excursions out of Florence - Il laghetto delle colonne

North of the city, on the hills between Fiesole and Settignano, 15 minutes driving from the center, you find the Fattoria di Maiano, a large farm and and family attraction. Within the vast park, you will find the Laghetto delle Colonne (Pond of the Columns). Built between 1870 and 1893 by Sir John Temple Leader, a wealthy English industrialist who moved to Florence, the area also includes a neo-Gothic tower, a tea house and rooms that served as dressing rooms for guests wishing to bathe. The waters are from the Mensola stream, flowing down from Fiesole. 
Take note: in the "Ninfale Fiesolano", a poem by Giovanni Boccaccio of 1346, Mensola is a beautiful nymph, transformed into a stream by the goddess Diana as she had violated her laws! The lake was built using the ancient and exhausted quarry of pietra serena known as Delle Colonne or Del Fossato, a stone particularly appreciated in the Renaissance for its gray-blue color and fine and homogeneous grain, very easy to sculpt and polish. In this quarry the best quality of this material. 
Notice in the picture below the veins of fine-grained gray-blue stone, called "pietra serena gentile", the one used by the architects in the Renaissance. The other brown ones are of "pietra bigia", a coarser grained version of the same stone, but much less valuable. 
Here Brunelleschi got the materials for the churches of Santo Spirito, San Lorenzo and the Cappella dei Principi (Medici Chapels) and Michelangelo for the stairway of the Laurentian Library. The whole hill, previously barren, was reforested in the nineteenth century with pines, holm oaks and cypresses and the trails used by the stonemasons became romantic paths. 

The park was inaugurated by Queen Victoria of England, a friend of John Temple Leader, in 1893. Prints of the time portray her while painting the pond. Around the water you can still see the layers of rocks carved by the workers in 1500, an emotion to think that the stones to build the staircase of the Laurentian Library, one of Michelangelo's masterpieces, came from here and that he himself came to choose them and check the extraction! Take the road to Fiesole, after San Domenico, turn right on via Benedetto da Maiano.