Pitti Palace

About

Construction of this palace begins in 1458 as the residence of the banker Luca Pitti, reportedly based on a design by Brunelleschi. The Pitti family's political and financial decline, however, leaves the building unfinished for years. Between 1549 and 1550, Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de' Medici, buys the residence and turns it into the new official seat of the Medici family, and only then does it take on the shape of a true palace. Bartolomeo Ammannati expands it through the 1560s and 1570s, and Bernardo Buontalenti and Giulio Parigi carry the work forward between 1618 and 1631. After the Medici line ends, the Habsburg-Lorraine family occupies the palace from 1737, followed by the House of Savoy from 1865. Behind the palace stretches the Boboli Gardens, roughly 45,000 square meters shaped between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, holding several hundred sculptures spanning from ancient Rome to the twentieth century. Today the palace houses several museums under one roof: the Palatine Gallery, with works by Raphael and Titian; the Gallery of Modern Art; the Costume and Fashion Museum; and the Treasury of the Grand Dukes. A 2014 administrative reform merged Palazzo Pitti, the Boboli Gardens, and the Uffizi Gallery into a single institution known as the Gallerie degli Uffizi.