Pitti Palace and Palatine Gallery

Palazzo Pitti is Florence's largest palace and one of the most significant in Italy, a vast rusticated stone building on the south bank of the Arno in the Oltrarno neighbourhood. Originally built for the Florentine merchant Luca Pitti in the 1450s, the palace was purchased by Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de' Medici, in 1549 and subsequently enlarged to its present dimensions across more than a century of construction. The Medici grand dukes, and later the House of Savoy when Florence briefly served as capital of unified Italy, used the palace as their principal residence. Today the building is divided into several distinct museums; the Palatine Gallery on the piano nobile (first floor) is the most visited. The Palatine Gallery was conceived as a display of Medici dynastic wealth rather than a didactic art survey: old master paintings are hung floor to ceiling in lavishly frescoed baroque state rooms in the arrangement the Medici intended rather than any chronological or thematic order. The collection contains more paintings by Raphael than any museum outside the Vatican, including the Donna Velata, the Gravida, the Madonna della Seggiola, and portraits of Angelo and Maddalena Doni. Titian is extensively represented, as are Rubens, Caravaggio, Fra Bartolommeo, Andrea del Sarto, and Pontormo. Beyond the Palatine Gallery, the Royal Apartments retain their late-nineteenth-century furnishings from the Savoy period, and the Gallery of Modern Art on the upper floor covers Italian painting and sculpture from roughly 1780 to 1920. A combined ticket includes the Palatine Gallery, Royal Apartments, and the Boboli Gardens immediately behind the palace.