Pitti Palace
The Palazzo Pitti is a Renaissance palace in the Oltrarno district of Florence . The building, which is ascribed to Filippo Brunelleschi in its basic inventory , was built for the merchant Luca Pitti from 1458 . The palace is the largest building in this district on the southern side of the Arno .
What is striking is the consistent use of roughly hewn stone blocks ( bosses ) as the only facade decoration on all three very similar floors, which give the building the fortress-like character typical of the buildings of the Florentine nobility (this is an essential difference to the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi and the Palazzo Strozzi ).
After the Pitti were convicted of participating in the Pazzi conspiracy, construction remained unfinished for nearly a hundred years. It was only after it had been sold to Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de 'Medici , in 1549 , that renovations and extensions and the creation of the Boboli Gardens began . The Florentine rafter roof was replaced by a lower one, hidden behind balustrades . In 1568, Bartolomeo Ammanati added Renaissance windows to the walled-up arched portals on the ground floor. He was also responsible for the garden facade, the design of the courtyard and parts of the gardens. The main building, which was originally laid out on three floors with seven window axes, was enlarged between 1620 and 1631 to a width of 13 window axes and supplemented by two two-story side wings with five axes each, which continue Brunelleschi's and Ammanati's facade design. Last in 1764 were single-storey side extensions with arcades that frame the forecourt.
In 1565 Giorgio Vasari built a long corridor over the Ponte Vecchio , which connects the Palazzo Pitti via the Church of Santa Felicità, the Ponte Vecchio bridge and the Uffizi with the Palazzo Vecchio on the other side of the Arno. In this way, the palace residents could commute back and forth between their residence and town hall without being disturbed by the common people.
The Palazzo Pitti was the residence of the Dukes of Tuscany since the 16th century, and later the Florentine residence of the King of Italy. King Victor Emmanuel III ceded it to the Italian state in 1919 - since then the Palazzo Pitti and its painting collections have been open to the public, including the Galleria Palatina of the Medici with works by Titian , Giorgione , Raffael and Rubens and the Galleria d'arte moderna with works from Classicism to the beginning of Italian Futurism at the turn of the 20th century.
Exhibitions and museums
The Palazzo Pitti houses the following museums and permanent exhibitions:
- Galleria Palatina (Medici painting collection)
- Galleria d'Arte Moderna (images from classicism to neoclassicism)
- the costume gallery ( Galleria del Costume )
- the porcelain museum ( Museo delle Porcellane )
- the silver museum ( Museo degli Argenti )
- the royal apartments ( Appartamenti Reali )
- the Carriage Museum ( Museo delle Carrozze )
In a side wing of the building is a station of the Carabinieri , which became famous for the crime novels by the British writer Magdalen Nabb .
The Palazzo Pitti was the model for the royal building of the Munich Residence .
Web links
- Website of the palace and its collections (Italian / English)
Coordinates: 43 ° 45 ′ 54 ″ N , 11 ° 15 ′ 0 ″ E