Palazzo Pitti ★★

The front of the Palazzo Pitti (Pitti Palace) in Florence.

Florence's princely Renaissance Pitti Palace was once home to the Medici, the Lorraines, and the Savoy Kings of Italy—now a whole series of museums

The rear facade of the Pitti Palace

This massive palace across the river that was once home to the Medici Grand Dukes now houses a plethora of museums and one heck of a painting gallery that makes the Uffizi look like a preamble.

You literally could not visit all six of its museums and the Boboli Gardens in a single day. However, 90 minutes to two hours will suffice for a run through the best part: the main paintings collection in the Galleria Palatina, pop your head into the Modern Art collection, and tour the sumptuously decorated Appartamenti Reali state apartments.

Peronsally, I'd also set aside another 45 mintues to relax in the Boboli Gardens.

Only those with a particular interest in the decorative arts (the Silver Museum and Museum of Porcelain) or history of fashion (Costume Gallery) will bother with the Pitti's various smaller, lesser collections. (Note: except by special appointment, the Museum of Carriages—where you can marvel at how the later Medici pimped their rides—is perennially closed.)

The sections of the Pitti Palace

Galleria Palatina ★★

These richly decorated rooms, many frescoed by baroque master Pietro da Cortona, are set up to look very much the way it did in the 18th century. The Palatina is especially strong in works by Raphael, Titian, and Andrea del Sarto alongside masterworks by a panoply late-Renaissance and baroque geniuses like Caravaggio, Rubens, Perugino, Giorgione, Guido Reni, Fra Bartolomeo, Tintoretto, Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Pontormo, Beccafumi... the list goes on and on... » more

 

Appartamenti Reali ★

This palace housed the Italian royal family when Florence was briefly (1865–70) capital of the newly unified Italy. The Appartamenti Reali (Royal Apartments), while they don't hold a candle to those at Versailles and other northern European palaces, are still a sight to behold in their neo-baroque and Victorian splendor or rich fabrics, frescoes, and oil paintings. They aren't always open to the public, but when they are, they are well worth taking a spin through... » more

 

Boboli Gardens ★

If you only see two parts of the Pitti, make it the Galleria Palatina and the Giardini di Boboli, one of the finest Renaissance parks anywhere, laid out between 1549 and 1656. This statue-filled park features fountains, grottoes, a rococo Kaffehaus for stylish refreshment in summer, grassy meadows for relaxing, and some pleasant wooded areas in which to get lost. It's also where the world's first true opera premiered... » more

 

Modern Art Gallery

The Galleria d'Arte Modernahas some good works by the Macchiaioli school, the Tuscan variant on Impressionism, which means lots of quietly noble cows standing about fields by the likes of Giovanni Fattori... » more

 

Museo degli Argenti

Among the Pitti Palace's lesser collections, the Silver Museum is the strongest, a decorative arts that goes beyond fussily extravagant silverware to include all the "treasures" that once belonged to the Medici and Lorraine Grand Dukes (whose taste declined proportionatly with their rise in power and wealth)... » more

 

Galleria del Costume

The Costume Gallery has some fabulous dresses, jewelry, and accessories dating back to the 1500s, though most of the clothes in this fashion museum date from the 19th century through the 1920s... » more

 

Museo delle Porcellane

The Museum of Porcelain houses the Medici's more breakable historic tablewares, with full dinner services, individual plates and cups, and glazed ceramic statuettes from the top porcelain producers of the 18th and 19th century from all across Europe... » more

 

The Palazzo Pitti itself

Ammanati's back courtyard of the Pitti Palace with the Boboli Gardens beyond.

Though the original, much smaller Pitti Palace was a Renaissance affair probably designed by Filippo Brunelleschi, that palazzo is completely hidden by the enormous mannerist mass we see today.

Inside are Florence's most extensive set of museums, including the Galleria Palatina, a huge painting gallery second in town only to the Uffizi, with famous works by Raphael, Andrea del Sarto, Titian, and Rubens.

When Luca Pitti died in 1472, Cosimo de' Medici's wife, Eleonora of Toledo, bought this property and unfinished palace to convert into the new Medici home—she hated the dark, cramped spaces of the family apartments in the Palazzo Vecchio.

They hired Bartolomeo Ammannati to enlarge the palazzo, which he did starting in 1560 by creating the courtyard out back, extending the wings out either side, and incorporating a Michelangelo architectural invention, "kneeling windows," on the ground floor of the facade.

(Rather than being visually centered between the line of the floor and that of the ceiling, kneeling windows' bases extend lower to be level with the ground or, in the case of upper stories, with whatever architectural element delineates the baseline of that story's first level.)

Later architects finished the building off by the 19th century, probably to Ammannati's original plans, in the end producing the oversize rustication of its outer walls and overall ground plan that make it one of the masterpieces of Florentine mannerist architecture.

The ticket office for the painting gallery—the main, and for many visitors, most interesting of the Pitti museums—is off Ammannati's excellent interior courtyard ★ of gold-tinged rusticated rock grafted onto the three classical orders.

Tips & links

Share this page

Search ReidsItaly.com