Description

The merchant Luca Pitti, first the friend and later the rival of Cosimo "the Elder", commissioned Filippo Brunelleschi to carry out the design of the building in around 1440.

Cosimo "the Elder" had meanwhile commissioned Michelozzo carry out Palazzo Medici in Via Larga, turning down an earlier project by Brunelleschi, which he thought was too obstentious and likely to arouse the jealousy of his fellow citizens .

This thought apparently did not worry Pitti at all, and he decided to employ the most brilliant architect of the times, whom he apparently, or so the legend goes, ordered to make the windows as big as the doors of the Medici residence and create an internal courtyard that was large enough to contain the whole of the palace in Via Larga.

Lately, the building end up in the Medici hands when the rich wife of Cosimo I dei Medici bought it with both park and square lying in front of it. By doubling its internal volume depth and adding side wings, this 15th century building was transformed into the most monumental of the late Renaissance Florentine buildings.

The Medici did not, in fact, move into it stably until many decades later and the Palace was used as a kind of representative house for ambassadors and kings besides being the place where they held the court's worldly events.

In the late 18th century, the palazzo was used as a power base by Napoleon, and later served for a brief period as the principal royal palace of the newly united Italy.

The most impotant area of the palace is the Palatine gallery, situated in the royal rooms and decorated by the barock master Pietro da Cortona. It contains part of the Medici collection that the owners didn't wanted to be explored at the Uffizzi because they wanted those paintings for private use.

The Galleria Palatina is one of eight museums of the Palazzo Pitti. It is located at the right corner of the inner yard, the left wing of the building. For the lovers of Raphael there is a room with more than ten paintings from him.

However, contrary to the Uffizis, displaying of the pictures does not take place in chronological order, but on the basis of a decorative point of view, in order to preserve the original character of the collection.