Visiting Florence

The Gallery occupies the entire first and second floor of the large building built between 1560 and 1580 based on a design by Giorgio Vasari: it is one of the most famous museums in the world for its extraordinary collections of ancient sculptures and paintings (from the Middle Ages to the modern). The collections of paintings from the fourteenth century and the Renaissance contain some absolute masterpieces of art of all time: it is enough to remember the names of Giotto, Simone Martini, Piero della Francesca, Beato Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Mantegna, Correggio, Leonardo, Raphael , Michelangelo, Caravaggio, as well as masterpieces of European painting, especially German, Dutch and Flemish. No less important in the panorama of Italian art is the collection of ancient statuary and busts of the Medici family. The collection adorns the corridors of the Gallery and includes ancient Roman sculptures, copies of lost Greek originals.

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Purchased in 1550 by Cosimo I de'Medici and his wife Eleonora di Toledo to transform it into the new grand ducal residence, Palazzo Pitti soon became the symbol of the consolidated power of the Medici over Tuscany. Palace of two other dynasties, that of the Habsburg-Lorraine (successors of the Medici from 1737) and the Savoy, who inhabited it as Italian royals from 1865, Palazzo Pitti still bears the name of its first owner, the Florentine banker Luca Pitti, who in the mid-fifteenth century wanted to build it - perhaps based on a design by Brunelleschi - beyond the Arno, at the foot of the Boboli hill. It is currently home to five different museums: the Treasury of the Grand Dukes and the Museum of Russian Icons, with the Palatine Chapel on the ground floor, the Palatine Gallery and the Imperial and Royal Apartments on the main floor of the Palace, the Gallery of Modern Art and the Museum of Fashion and Costume on the second floor.

Acquista Biglietti

Behind Palazzo Pitti lies the marvelous Boboli Gardens. The Medici were the first to take care of its arrangement, creating the model of Italian garden which became exemplary for many European courts. The vast green surface divided in a regular way constitutes a true open-air museum, populated with ancient and Renaissance statues, adorned with caves, first of all the famous one created by Bernardo Buontalenti, and large fountains, such as that of Neptune and of the Ocean. The subsequent Lorraine and Savoy dynasties further enriched its structure, expanding the borders that run along the ancient city walls up to Porta Romana. Of notable visual appeal is the terraced area where the eighteenth-century Kaffeehaus pavilion is located, a rare example of Rococo architecture in Tuscany, or the Limonaia, built by Zanobi del Rosso between 1777 and 1778. The visit to Boboli completes that of the Royal Palace of Pitti, of which it is an integral part, and allows for fully grasp the spirit of court life and at the same time enjoy the experience of a garden that is always renewed while respecting its tradition. 

Designed by Giorgio Vasari to allow the Grand Dukes to move safely from their private abode of Pitti Palace to the seat of government in Palazzo Vecchio, this extraordinary aerial walkway was commissioned by Duke Cosimo I de' Medici in 1565 on the occasion of his son Francesco’s wedding with Joanna of Austria. Thanks to the extraordinary organization of the building site, the construction works lasted just five months: a corridor of 760 meters from its beginning at the Uffizi to its end by the Buontalenti Grotto in the Boboli Gardens. In this section the Corridor passes over the streets, runs along the Arno River and crosses it, enters the palaces, bypasses the Mannelli Tower, overlooks the Church of Santa Felicita, and goes on with a sequence of views over the city that allowed the Dukes to catch its beauty and control it as well.

Today's museum is located on the site of a building used since 1296 to house the Opera del Duomo, the institution founded by the Florentine Republic and overseen by theArte della Lana, whose task was the construction, furnishing and maintenance of the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.

In the 15th century there was a courtyard here used by Brunelleschi to store timbers for the construction of the dome, and also here, around 1500, Michelangelo sculpted the famous David.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Opera del Duomo, finding itself in the situation of having to choose whether to transfer to other Museums in the City its most important works of art that had been decommissioned from their original locations (especially the two cantorie by Luca della Robbia and Donatello) or to keep them in rooms usable by the public, decided to allocate some rooms of its offices as exhibition halls, and in 1891 it opened its Museum to the public.

Over the centuries, in fact, a mind-boggling collection of masterpieces from the three monuments and priceless historical records of the fabbrica of Santa Maria del Fiore, such as Brunelleschi 's models for the dome, the 16th-17th-century plans for the facade and the 19th-century plans made for the competitions held for the neo-Gothic front, had gathered . Other important marbles, such as Michelangelo's St. Matthew, had already found their way into the collections of the Accademia Gallery and the Bargello National Museum.

The Fashion and Costume Museum (formerly known as the “Costume Gallery”) is located in the Palazzina della Meridiana, leaning against the southern wing of the Pitti Palace. The building, begun under Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine by the architect Gaspero Maria Paoletti in 1776-and completed in 1830 by Pasquale Poccianti at the behest of Leopold II of Lorraine-takes its name from the astronomical instrument made by Vincenzo Viviani in 1699, located in the vestibule of the then apartment of Grand Prince Ferdinando de'Medici, in whose vault, where the gnomonic hole is drilled, Anton Domenico Gabbiani had depicted the Allegory of Time and the Arts (1693). All the successive dynasties, from the Lorraines to the Savoy dynasties, passing through the regency of Maria Luisa of Bourbon Parma and the brief reign of Elisa Baciocchi, have left their mark on the furnishings and decorative apparatus of the wall paintings. Founded in 1983, it constitutes Italy's first state museum dedicated to the history of fashion and its social significance.

On the whole, the collection of works housed, displayed in turn according to a rotation adopted for conservation reasons, includes fashion clothes and accessories from the 18th century to the present, as well as lingerie, jewelry and costume jewelry, and a fascinating corpus of stage dresses from famous films, plays and operas - signed by great directors of the 20th century - worn by Italian and international film and show business stars.

The Museo Galileo collects valuable scientific instruments from the Medici and Lorraine collections (16th-19th centuries).

The origin of the Medici collection is due to Cosimo I (1519-1574), who placed it in the Guardaroba of the Palazzo Vecchio (today's Sala delle Carte Geografiche). In 1600 Ferdinand I (1549-1609) moved the instruments to the Stanzino delle Matematiche in the Uffizi Gallery. The adjacent terrace housed the large armillary sphere built by Antonio Santucci in 1593. During the 17th century, instruments were added that were intended for the experiments of the Accademia del Cimento (1657-1667), in whose headquarters in the Pitti Palace the entire Medici collection later found its place.

In 1775 Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine founded the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History: the entire Medici collection was transferred to its home in Palazzo Torrigiani (where the present Specola Museum is located). New instruments in mathematics, physics, meteorology and electricity, many of them built in the Museum's workshops, formed the core of the Lorraine collection. In 1841, at the behest of Leopold II of Lorraine (1797-1870), the Galileo Tribune was built in the Royal Museum of Physics, where instruments and relics of the great scientist were displayed, as well as Renaissance and Accademia del Cimento instruments.

In the 1840s, Baron Seymour Kirkup, along with other collaborators, financed a series of surveys inside the chapel of Santa Maria Maddalena in the Bargello palace and prison, as a result of which, on July 21, 1840, the painter-restorer Antonio Marini unearthed a portrait of Dante Alighieri, which Vasari said had been painted by Giotto. This, in the immediate aftermath, led to the restoration of the environment under the care of architect Francesco Leoni, assisted by Pasquale Poccianti. Also as a result of the uproar caused by the discovery, in 1857, the restoration of the entire building began.

Having transferred the prison to the Murate, it was decided in 1859 the restoration of the complex protracted until 1865 and under the direction of Francesco Mazzei, who restored the ancient appearance and tried to recover or redo ex novo the architectural ornaments and entrusting the pictorial decorations of the rooms to Gaetano Bianchi who was inspired by monuments of the same era.

In 1865 the National Museum was inaugurated on the ground floor two rooms of arms were set up, with objects coming partly from the Medici armory and partly from the Guardaroba of the Palazzo Vecchio, and a room of sculpture of the fifteenth-fifteenth century. In the hall on the second floor, sculptures from the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio, which in the meantime had become the seat of the Italian Parliament, found their place.

“La Specola,” on Via Romana in Florence, is one of the locations of the Museum of Natural History of the University of Florence and is the heir to the oldest scientific museum in Europe to be open to the public[1]. Notably, this very building (Palazzo Torrigiani, formerly Bini) housed the core of the collections when the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History was established in 1775, while today, after the separation of the collections, it houses two distinct collections: the zoological one with examples of animals preserved mainly by stuffing, and the anatomical one, with wax models dating mostly from the 18th century. The Specola's name refers to the observatory that Grand Duke Peter Leopold installed in the torrino, where the meteorological station of Florence's Museo La Specola was also located.