Palazzo Vecchio

Lonely Planet review

The 95m-high (312ft) bell tower of the fortress-like, rhomboid-shaped Palazzo Vecchio (Old Palace) soars above Piazza della Signoria, another famous Florence emblem. The palace was built by Arnolfo di Cambio between 1298 and 1314 and has been the seat of civic authority ever since.

The interior got its Mannerist makeover from Medici favourite Giorgio Vasari in 1540 when Cosimo I temporarily moved in. Vasari used to boast about how quickly he could churn out art and a bitchy Michelangelo once quipped that his haste showed in the results.

Vasari is largely responsible for the ostentatious decoration in the Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the Five Hundred), which, although built to house Savonarola's Republican government, was turned into a grandiose expression of Medici power in the 1560s.

The Sala dei Gigli houses the Palazzo's greatest treasure, Donatello's bronze masterpiece Judith and Holofernes (1457), depicting the expressionless biblical heroine about to decapitate a drunken Holofernes, and meant to symbolise Humility's victory over Pride.

When the Medicis were temporarily banished in 1495, Savonarola's government placed it under the Loggia della Signoria (where a copy now stands) with a new base and inscription warning tyrants what they could expect.