The Pitti Palace

Palazzo Pitti was the residence of the Medici family, then of the Habsburg-Lorraine family and finally of the Savoy family. It can be considered an actual royal palace. It is located on the slopes of the Boboli hill, and it still retains the name of the man who had it built in the mid-fifteenth century, Luca Pitti. It was Eleanor of Toledo, wife of the first Grand Duke, Cosimo I of the Medicis, who transformed it into a sumptuous residence with an adjoining garden; both were expanded over the centuries to make it what we see today.

Palazzo Pitti is now home to 4 different museums which are the Palatine Gallery and Imperial and Royal Apartments, the Gallery of Modern Art, the Museum of Costume and Fashion and the Treasury of the Grand Dukes.

The Palatine Gallery, together with the Imperial and Royal Apartments, occupies the first floor of the Pitti Palace. It holds the rich picture gallery of the Medici family, and it was inaugurated by the Lorraine family between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century with around 500 works selected from the Medici collection. It is an extraordinary assortment of pieces and it certainly displays some of the most important works by Raphael, but also masterpieces by Titian, Tintoretto, Caravaggio and Rubens. Absolutely worth seeing are Woman with a Veil by Raphael, Saint Mary Magdalene by Artemisia Gentileschi and Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Cristofano Allori.

The Gallery of Modern Art includes works of modern art, paintings and sculptures from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the 1930s that come from the Grand Ducal collections and private donations such as that by Diego Martelli. The Macchiaioli section is one of the most popular, with paintings by Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega and Telemaco Signorini, as well as works by Hayez and Canova.

The Treasury of the Grand Dukes was once known as the Silverworks museum, and retains a very rich collection of vases and furnishings in precious stones and metals. The museum is located on the ground and mezzanine floors of the palace, in what were once the summer apartments of the Medici family. The rooms are entirely decorated with various frescoed scenes designed to celebrate the marriage between Ferdinando II of the Medici house and Vittoria della Rovere in 1637. Do not miss the amazing collection of jewels created between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries and the section dedicated to contemporary jewelry .