A route that links the Medici residences and hands the telling of them to creators, taking audiences from the feed to the visit itself.
In 2026 the Medici Villas and Gardens in Tuscany become a social tour: four stops, each entrusted to a different creator, travelling across the Medici heritage from one villa to the next.
The idea comes from a concrete problem. The villas and gardens inscribed by UNESCO in 2013 number fourteen, spread across Florence, Prato, Pistoia and the Versilia coast: anyone visiting one of them is unlikely to realise they have set foot in a system reaching as far as the Apuan Alps. A dispersed heritage is told one piece at a time, and each piece tends to stay isolated.
A tour addresses exactly this, because a route connects what it crosses. The 2026 tour connects voices as well: each stop is matched to a creator, chosen for the audience already following them and working from a brief built around their own language. The villas reach different communities without being translated into a single message.
On Instagram, the story unfolds stop by stop, through the creators’ content and their different perspectives on the Medici Villas and Gardens.
The four stops follow the pillars of the editorial plan and together form a narrative that shifts focus. It begins with the villas as family places, somewhere to return to on a Sunday. It moves to the staging of power, which in the Medici residences is architecture before it is history. It closes in on artistic detail, the kind a quick visit misses. It opens out again onto the routes linking one garden to the next.
And it is the last stop that brings everything back down to earth. Those routes genuinely exist and are mapped in the project’s app, which makes practicable what the content suggests: reaching a villa without a car, building an itinerary across several residences, finding your way once there.
Because for cultural heritage the measure is not views. It is the people who, having seen a villa told by someone they trust, decide to go. Digital storytelling exists to generate visits, not to replace them.
