Palazzo Pitti

Palazzo Pitti is a Renaissance palace in the Oltrarno district of Florence. Attributed in its basic structure to Filippo Brunelleschi, it was built from 1458 for the merchant Luca Pitti. The palace is the largest building of this district on the southern side of the Arno.

The consistent use of roughly hewn stone ashlars (ashlar work) as the only façade decoration on all three floors, which are very similar to each other, is striking and gives the building the fortress-like character typical of the buildings of the Florentine nobility (here lies an essential difference to the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi and the Palazzo Strozzi).

After the Pitti were convicted of participating in the Pazzi conspiracy, the building remained unfinished for almost a hundred years. Only after it was sold in 1549 to Eleonora of Toledo, the wife of Cosimo I de' Medici, was work begun on alterations and extensions and the creation of the Boboli Gardens. The Florentine rafter roof was replaced by a lower one hidden behind balustrades. In 1568 Bartolomeo Ammanati inserted Renaissance windows in the walled-up arched portals of the ground floor. He was also responsible for the garden façade, the design of the courtyard and parts of the gardens. The main building, originally three-storey with seven window axes, was enlarged between 1620 and 1631 to a width of 13 window axes and supplemented by two two-storey side wings, each with five axes, which seamlessly continued Brunelleschi's and Ammanati's façade design. The last of these was followed in 1764 by single-storey side extensions with arcades framing the forecourt.

In 1565 Giorgio Vasari built a long corridor across the Ponte Vecchio, connecting the Palazzo Pitti with the Palazzo Vecchio on the other side of the Arno via the Church of Santa Felicità, the Ponte Vecchio bridge and the Uffizi. This allowed the palace residents to commute between their residence and the town hall unmolested by the common people.

Palazzo Pitti was the residence of the Dukes of Tuscany from the 16th century, and later the Florentine residence of the King of Italy. King Victor Emmanuel III ceded it to the Italian state in 1919 - since then the Palazzo Pitti and its collections of paintings have been open to the public, including the Medici's Galleria Palatina with works by Titian, Giorgione, Raphael and Rubens, and the Galleria d'arte moderna with works from classicism to the beginning of Italian futurism at the turn of the 20th century.