Uffizi Galleries – Virtual Tour 360°

In 1560 Cosimo I de’ Medici commissioned Giorgio Vasari to design a U-shaped palace on the narrow strip of land between Palazzo Vecchio and the Arno. The brief was administrative, not artistic: to gather under one roof the thirteen principal magistracies of the Tuscan grand-ducal state — the uffici from which the building took its name. Vasari conceived a long double portico in pietra serena and intonaco, with a continuous loggia framing a piazzale that opens like a stage between the city’s civic centre and the river. He died in 1574 with the work unfinished; Bernardo Buontalenti and Alfonso Parigi the Elder carried it to completion in 1581. In 1565, in parallel, Vasari built the elevated corridor that still bears his name, an aerial passageway over Ponte Vecchio linking Palazzo Vecchio through the Uffizi to the new Medici residence at Palazzo Pitti, allowing the grand duke to move between offices and palace without descending into the street.

From 1581 Francesco I began to install the family’s growing art collection on the top floor, in a sequence of rooms culminating in the octagonal Tribuna designed by Buontalenti. Over the next two centuries the Medici assembled one of the most important collections of Italian Renaissance painting and antique sculpture in Europe. When the dynasty extinguished, the last Medici heir, Anna Maria Luisa, signed in 1737 the Patto di Famiglia, the family pact that bound the entire collection to the city of Florence in perpetuity — forbidding its dispersal, sale or removal. In 1769 the Galleria was officially opened to the public by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine, decades before the Louvre. The collection visitors still walk through today includes Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Primavera, Leonardo’s Annunciation and Adoration of the Magi, Raphael’s Madonna del Cardellino, Titian’s Venus of Urbino, Caravaggio’s Bacchus and Medusa, and Michelangelo’s Tondo Doni.

Two modern dates left their mark on the building. In November 1966 the flood of the Arno reached the lower floors and the storerooms. On the night of 27 May 1993 a Mafia car bomb exploded in Via dei Georgofili, beside the west wing: five people were killed, and part of the building, the first stretch of the Vasari Corridor and several works were damaged. Outside, the courtyard is lined with nineteenth-century statues of illustrious Tuscans, among them Dante, Giotto, Machiavelli, Galileo, Leonardo and Michelangelo. From the loggia above the river, looking back, the tower of Palazzo Vecchio stands framed between the two wings: the view Vasari built the piazzale around.

The long Nuovi Uffizi project has roughly doubled the museum’s exhibition space, opening new monographic rooms — among them the renovated Botticelli and Caravaggio halls — and reorganising the visitor route under successive directors Eike Schmidt and Simone Verde. The Gallerie degli Uffizi today is a single institutional cluster that includes Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens on the opposite bank of the Arno, sold as an integrated ticket. With about 5.3 million visitors across its three sites in 2024, second among Italy’s state museums after the Colosseum, it is one of the most visited art institutions in the world and a working laboratory of conservation, digital cataloguing and loan policy for the entire Italian Renaissance corpus.