Pitti Palace

1458: Luca Pitti, and the architect who could not have built it

The core of the palace dates from 1458, when the Florentine banker Luca Pitti (1398–1472) commissioned a town residence on the far side of the Arno. Vasari later credited Brunelleschi with the design, which is impossible — Brunelleschi died twelve years before construction began — and the work is now generally given to his pupil Luca Fancelli.

The severity is the point. Three repeated rows of seven arch-headed openings in rusticated stone read more like a Roman aqueduct than a palace front, and the formula was simply extended each time the building grew, which is why a structure enlarged over three centuries still looks like one idea. Work stopped in 1464 when Pitti's finances collapsed after the death of Cosimo de' Medici, and he died in 1472 with the house unfinished.

1549: Eleonora di Toledo buys it, and Vasari doubles it

The unfinished palace was sold in 1549 to Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de' Medici. Cosimo had Giorgio Vasari enlarge it with a new block along the rear, more than doubling the building, and it was Vasari who then ran the raised walkway from the seat of government through the Uffizi and over Ponte Vecchio to the new residence — the Vasari Corridor, still sold as its own ticket today, which ends by dropping you into the gardens behind this palace.

At first the family kept sleeping at Palazzo Vecchio and used Pitti for guests and court functions. It was their son Francesco I, with his wife Johanna of Austria, who moved in permanently and brought the art collection with him.

Lorraine, Napoleon, Savoy — and the gift of 1919

When Gian Gastone de' Medici died in 1737 the male line ended and Tuscany passed to the Habsburg-Lorraine grand dukes, with Napoleon using the palace during his control of Italy. The House of Savoy inherited it in 1860, and when Florence was briefly the capital of the Kingdom of Italy, Victor Emmanuel II lived here until 1871 — the throne room in the Royal Apartments was decorated for him.

His grandson Victor Emmanuel III presented the palace to the nation in 1919. The state then split the interior into separate galleries, which is the arrangement you buy a ticket for today: about 140 rooms open to the public, most of them decorated later than the shell that holds them.

The Palatine Gallery: 28 rooms hung the way a private collection was hung

The main gallery holds over 500 principally Renaissance paintings across 28 rooms, and it is deliberately not arranged by school or date. Canvases are stacked frame to frame up the walls of the rooms they were bought for, which is disorienting for twenty minutes and then becomes the reason to come: this is a grand-ducal collection still in its own furniture.

Raphael is the reason most people are here. The Madonna della Seggiola (1516) and the Portrait of Agnolo Doni (1506) hang in the Room of Saturn, the Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami with them; La Velata (1516) is in the Room of Jupiter, alongside work by Rubens, Andrea del Sarto and Perugino. Titian, Correggio and Pietro da Cortona are through the same enfilade.

The Planetary Rooms, and the ceilings that inspired Versailles

The five state rooms at the front of the piano nobile were frescoed by Pietro da Cortona in the high baroque: Venus, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter — the Medici throne room — and Saturn, sequenced by Ptolemaic cosmology. Cortona began in the small Sala della Stufa with the Four Ages of Man, the Age of Gold and the Age of Silver in 1637, Bronze and Iron in 1641; he left Florence in 1647 and his pupil Ciro Ferri finished the cycle by the 1660s.

Those ceilings went on to inspire the Planet Rooms at Louis XIV's Versailles, designed by Charles Le Brun. Look up in the Room of Jupiter before you look at La Velata; almost nobody does, and the ceiling is the better argument for the ticket.

The Royal Apartments: 14 rooms in Savoy Empire style

The Royal Apartments run off the Palatine Gallery — fourteen rooms, largely redecorated in Empire style by the Savoy monarchs, though some Medici-era decoration and furniture survives. The Green Room was frescoed by Castagnoli in the early nineteenth century and holds a seventeenth-century intarsia cabinet; the throne room, done for Victor Emmanuel II, is red brocade and Chinese and Japanese vases. Sustermans portraits of the Medici hang throughout.

These rooms are the smallest step in the visit: they open straight off the gallery and add perhaps twenty-five minutes.

Treasury of the Grand Dukes, Costume, Modern Art, Russian Icons

The Treasury of the Grand Dukes, long called the Silver Museum, holds silverware, ivories, cameos and hardstone work including Lorenzo de' Medici's ancient vases with their fifteenth-century silver-gilt mounts, plus a room of curiosities with a pre-Columbian jade mask. Its most spectacular ceilings are the 1635–1636 frescoes by Giovanni da San Giovanni. The mezzanine of the Treasury is closed until further notice, a notice posted on the official page. The ground-floor rooms are open.

The Museum of Costume and Fashion, in the Palazzina della Meridiana wing, was founded in 1983 and is the only museum in Italy tracing the history of Italian fashion; among its exhibits are the sixteenth-century funeral clothes of Cosimo I, Eleonora of Toledo and their son Garzia. The Gallery of Modern Art moved into the palace in 1922 and opened to the public in 1928, covering nineteenth- and twentieth-century Tuscan painting — the Macchiaioli are its strength. The Museum of Russian Icons, the Palatine Chapel and the Ammannati courtyard complete the list on the official page.

A palace this size is easier to take in as part of one of the best tours in Florence, where a guide can lead you straight to the Treasury, the Gallery of Modern Art and the other collections under this roof.

The decision, if you only have two hours

Do the Palatine Gallery and the Royal Apartments, skip the rest, and spend the hour you saved in the Boboli Gardens instead. The Palatine is the collection nowhere else in Florence duplicates; Modern Art and Costume are good museums that will still be good on a return trip. If somebody in the party is not a painting person, the gardens are the better half of the combined ticket for them, and the two entrances are 100 metres apart.

A three-hour guided tour makes exactly this split for you — Palatine Gallery, then Boboli, with a licensed guide and the tickets included.

The rule of thumb is simple. Palace and gardens on one day: the reserved palace and Boboli ticket at €30 (about $35), or the palace and garden ticket with eBook at €35 (about $41), which adds the Villa Bardini garden. Palace, gardens and the Uffizi within five days: the five-day pass from €68 (about $79), which arranges your Uffizi slot and means one checkout instead of three.

The palace does not sell out the way the Uffizi does, so a dated ticket here is about fixing your day rather than beating a queue. Book the date you know you will be on the Oltrarno side.

Free days, reduced tickets and the Firenzecard

Entry is free for under-18s of any nationality with ID, and free for everybody on the first Sunday of each month. EU citizens aged 18 to 25 pay a reduced rate with ID. The first-Sunday queue at Piazza de' Pitti is shorter than the equivalent at the Uffizi, which makes this one of the better free-Sunday museums in the city — the crowd concentrates across the river.

The Firenzecard includes Pitti and lists it as no reservation required, so cardholders walk to the entrance. At €85 for 72 hours the card only makes sense if you are doing six or seven paid sites; two museums and a garden do not get you there.

What each card adds

The palace and garden ticket with eBook covers the palace museums, Boboli and the Villa Bardini garden, with eBooks sent by WhatsApp or email. It is non-refundable, so fix your date first. The Tiqets reserved entry puts the palace and the gardens on one voucher with a downloadable Florence city audio guide.

The two five-day passes, ACCORD's and Slow Tour Tuscany's, both at €68, bundle the Uffizi slot with the palace and gardens. What they buy is the Uffizi arrangement: ACCORD meets you by the Cellini statue fifteen minutes before your slot, Slow Tour sends you straight to Uffizi entrance 1 with no voucher exchange. Both are non-refundable.

Pitti Palace opens Tuesday to Sunday, 08:15 to 18:30, all year. The ticket office in Piazza de' Pitti closes one hour before the palace does, at 17:30, so plan to be through the door before then.

The palace is closed every Monday, on 1 January and on 25 December. That matters more than it sounds: the Boboli Gardens behind it are open on most Mondays, so a Monday in Florence can still be a Pitti-side day, just an outdoor one. The Monday openings page has the full list of what is running.

Crowding here is nothing like the Uffizi's. Coach groups work through the Palatine Gallery late morning; by 16:30 the salons are close to empty and the light through the front windows is at its best. That is our observation from the pattern of group departures, not a figure the museum publishes.

• Emptiest: the 08:15 opening, or after 16:30
• Ticket office shuts at 17:30 — arrive by 17:00 to buy and get in
• Closed Mondays, 1 January and 25 December; the gardens open most Mondays
• Free for all on the first Sunday of the month, no reservation

The address is Piazza de' Pitti, 50125 Firenze — the sloping square on the Oltrarno side, twenty metres up from Via Guicciardini. The official page does not give a street number, and it does not need to: the façade takes the whole square. On foot from the centre it is the obvious walk.

From Piazza della Signoria cross Ponte Vecchio and keep straight up Via Guicciardini — eight to ten minutes at a normal pace, and the palace appears at the top on your left. From Santa Maria Novella station allow twenty minutes. From 1 August 2026 an urban bus or tram ticket costs €2 (about $2.30) and lasts 90 minutes, bought in the app, at a tobacconist or with contactless on board.

There is one entrance for visitors, through the courtyard off the square, with the ticket office on the left as you face the building. Do not drive: the historic centre is a ZTL, closed to unauthorised cars Monday to Friday 07:30–20:00 and Saturday 07:30–16:00, and Piazza de' Pitti sits inside it.

• 8–10 minutes on foot from Piazza della Signoria across Ponte Vecchio
• 20 minutes on foot from Santa Maria Novella station; urban bus or tram €2, 90 minutes
• One visitor entrance through the courtyard; ticket office on the left in the square
• The garden entrance is inside the same courtyard — you do not leave the building to reach Boboli

The pairing that works is Pitti in the morning and Boboli after lunch, uphill through the gardens while the palace fills with groups, out at Porta Romana or Belvedere in the late afternoon. Take the palace and gardens ticket, do the Palatine Gallery first, and you are through the paying part by 11:00.

The other honest plan is to skip the palace entirely on a short trip. Two days in Florence are not enough for the Uffizi, the Accademia and this; the three-day itinerary is where Pitti earns a slot. If you are choosing between museums, the museums page sets them against each other by price and time needed, and florence attractions covers everything else in the city.

The rest of this site — tickets, neighbourhoods, day trips — branches off our page of the best things to do in florence.