Palazzo Pitti

Lonely Planet review

When the Pitti, a wealthy merchant family, asked Brunelleschi to design their home, they did not have modesty in mind. Great rivals of the Medici, there is not a little irony in the fact that their grandiloquence would one day be sacrificed to the bank account.

In 1549 Eleonora de Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de' Medici, finding Palazzo Vecchio too claustrophobic, acquired the palace from a by-now rather skint Pitti family. She launched the extension work, which ended up crawling along until 1839! Throughout that time the original design was respected and today you would be hard-pressed to distinguish the various phases of construction.

After the demise of the Medici dynasty, the palace remained the residence of the city's rulers, the dukes of Lorraine and their Austrian and (briefly) Napoleonic successors. When Florence was made capital of the nascent Kingdom of Italy in 1865, it became a residence of the Savoy royal family, who graciously presented it to the state in 1919.

From Palazzo Pitti you can also access the Giardino di Boboli.