Uffizi Gallery
Vasari's Medici office block on the Arno, holding the world's foremost collection of Renaissance painting.
Cosimo I de' Medici commissioned Giorgio Vasari in 1560 to build a single block of offices, or uffizi, for the Florentine magistracies, on a narrow site running from the Palazzo Vecchio to the Arno. Vasari died in 1574 and the work was carried on by Bernardo Buontalenti and Alfonso Parigi. The top floor was fitted out from 1581 as a gallery for the family's antiquities and paintings, making it one of the earliest purpose-built museum interiors in Europe and the model for many that followed.
The collection passed to the Tuscan state in 1737 under the Medici family pact, which bound it to Florence for ever. Its strength is Italian painting from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, hung in roughly chronological order along the two long corridors and the rooms opening off them. The Uffizi Galleries also administer the Pitti Palace, the Boboli Gardens and the Vasari Corridor, the raised passage of 1565 that runs above the Ponte Vecchio and reopened to visitors in 2024.
Highlights
- Botticelli's Primavera and The Birth of Venus in the Botticelli rooms
- Leonardo's Annunciation and the unfinished Adoration of the Magi
- Caravaggio's Medusa and Bacchus on the first floor
- The Vasari Corridor, running above the Ponte Vecchio to the Pitti Palace
