Princely Renaissance Palace

Florence's Palazzo Pitti (Pitti Palace)

This massive palace across the river that was once home to the Medici Grand Dukes now houses a plethora of museums and one heck of a painting gallery that makes the Uffizi look like a preamble. You literally could not visit all six of its museums and the Boboli Gardens in a single day, but an hour and a half to two hours will suffice for a run through the main paintings collection, the Galleria Palatina.

Set up to look very much the way it did in the 18th century, these richly decorated rooms (many frescoed by baroque master Pietro da Cortona) contain masterworks by late-Renaissance and baroque geniuses like Caravaggio, Rubens, Perugino, Giorgione, Guido Reni, Fra Bartolomeo, Tintoretto, Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Pontormo, Beccafumi...the list goes on and on. It's especially strong in works by Raphael, Titian, and Andrea del Sarto.

This palace housed the Italian royal family when Florence was briefly capital of the newly unified Italy in the 1870s. The Apartamenti Reali (Royal Apartments), while they don't hold a candle to those at Versailles and other northern European palaces, are still a sight to behold in their neo-baroque and Victorian splendor or rich fabrics, frescoes, and oil paintings.

The Birth of Opera
In 1589, the Medici held a wedding reception in the Boboli Gardens, and for the occasion commissioned musical entertainment from Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini. The composers came up with the novel idea of setting a classical story (Dafne) to music and having actors sing the whole thing. Thus was opera born. The team later collaborated on Erudice (1600), which also premiered here and whose score has survived as the oldest opera.

If you only see two parts of the Pitti, make it the Galleria Palatina and the Boboli Gardens, one of the finest Renaissance parks anywhere, laid out between 1549 and 1656. This statue-filled park features fountains, grottoes, a rococo Kaffehaus for stylish refreshment in summer, and some pleasant wooded areas to get lost in.

As for the rest of the Pitti Palace: The Galleria d'Arte Moderna (Modern Art gallery) has some good works by the Macchiaioli school, the Tuscan variant on impressionism.

The Galleria del Costume (Costume Gallery) is what it sounds like, with some fabulous dresses dating back to the 1500s.

The Museo degli Argenti (Silver Museum) is a decorative arts collection that seems to show off no more than the Grand Duke's relentless bad taste, but it has kitsch value.

Piazza Pitti (cross the Ponte Vecchio and follow Via Guicciardini)
tel. +39-055-238-8614, www.polomuseale.firenze.it
Museums closed Mondays; Boboli Gardens closed first and last Mon of month