Palazzo Vecchio

The Palazzo Vecchio is the building around which Florentine public life has revolved for more than 700 years. It is still the seat of Florence's city government — the mayor's office is inside — while simultaneously housing one of the most significant museum collections in the city and dominating the Piazza della Signoria, which is itself essentially an outdoor gallery of copies of major Florentine Renaissance sculpture. The building manages to be, simultaneously, a working municipal building, a major Renaissance and Gothic monument, a museum of extraordinary importance, and the backdrop for the piazza where the most violent moments of Florentine political history played out: the burning of Savonarola, the execution of the Pazzi conspirators, the proclamation of various short-lived republics and restorations.

The palace was commissioned in 1299 by the Priors of Florence (the governing council of the Florentine Republic) as a secure seat of government — literally a fortress in which the priors could deliberate without being subject to the violent pressure of factional politics. The design, attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio, is a massive, crenellated rectangle of rustic ashlar with an imposing vertical emphasis created by the 94-metre Torre di Arnolfo projecting from one corner. The tower's deliberate off-centre positioning on the facade — which gives the building its characteristically asymmetric appearance — is explained by a medieval building code that forbade erecting public structures over the razed site of a condemned traitor's house: the land under the tower's natural geometric centre had belonged to a family whose treason required that nothing be built there. The asymmetry that 21st-century visitors admire as dramatically medieval was, at the time, a legal constraint.

The building's character shifted radically in the 1560s, when Cosimo I de' Medici, having consolidated his position as Duke of Tuscany, commissioned Giorgio Vasari (the artist, architect, and first art historian) to transform the medieval republican palace into a ducal residence and display space. Vasari's programme was thorough and astonishing in scale: the Salone dei Cinquecento, the vast room originally built by Savonarola for the Great Council of the restored republic, was raised by several metres and its ceiling covered with 39 painted panels depicting the history of Florentine military and civic glory. The walls were frescoed with battle scenes. The room, 54 metres long and 23 metres wide, became the largest and most overtly propagandistic room in Renaissance Florence — a statement of Medici power framed in the vocabulary of republican history.

The Studiolo of Francesco I, hidden on the first floor, is the intimate counterpoint to the Salone's theatrical bombast. This tiny windowless room — essentially a private cabinet of curiosities — was designed by Vasari and decorated by Bronzino, Alessandro Allori, and dozens of other artists in the 1570s, its every surface covered with allegories of earth, air, fire, and water, painted over storage niches that once held Francesco's collection of precious natural specimens, tools, and curiosities. It is one of the most completely preserved examples of Mannerist interior design in existence, and one of the most quietly extraordinary rooms in a city full of extraordinary rooms.

The GYG-listed experience (t68021, 4.4★, 5,022 reviews, from €32, approximately 2 hours) covers the main palace with audioguide. The Torre di Arnolfo tower climb (separate ticket, limited daily capacity) is bookable independently through the city museums website. The palace is a 2-minute walk from the Uffizi Gallery and 5 minutes from the Duomo — allow a full day if combining all three.