The Uffizi Gallery in Florence: the most visited museum in Italy
Don’t be discouraged by the long line in front of the entrance: the Uffizi Gallery in Florence is the most visited museum in Italy. Every year its rich and ancient art collections attract millions of tourists in the city, and to enter you have to be patient, but its rooms preserve an artistic heritage that - for number and value - knows no equal in our country and in the world.
The construction of the Uffizi Gallery began in the middle of the Sixteenth century thanks to the initiative of Cosimo I de Medici, who commissioned famous painter, architect and art historian Giorgio Vasari to design what was initially conceived as a residence: the rooms of the Medici family on the upper floor, the works of art owned by them to the lower one. Vasari is also responsible for the construction of a very long corridor - known as Vasariano - that, crossing the city and the river Arno above Ponte Vecchio, connects Palazzo Vecchio (seat of the government at the time) to Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens, home of the family.
Over the centuries, the Gallery’s collection of works gradually expanded, and opened its doors to the public in 1769. The rest is history: inside the spaces of the Uffizi there are today the most important and extensive testimonies of the Italian Renaissance and the artistic history of our country. The boundless production of Giotto and Cimabue, the works of Masaccio, Paolo Uccello and Piero della Francesca, but also of Michelangelo (the famous Statue of David is at the Gallerie dell'Accademia, but his Tondo Doni is a Mannerist masterpiece), Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio and even Leonardo da Vinci. The gems - and probably the most famous and visited works of the museum - are, however, The Birth of Venus and the Spring by Sandro Botticelli, both eternal icons of Italian Renaissance art. The works of the museum are arranged chronologically along the plan of the Gallery, in order to allow visitors to take away with them an accurate photograph of how the taste and the artistic trends have changed and evolved over the centuries.
The Uffizi Gallery is an essential stop of your visit to Florence, like the tour in the leather shops - a renowned Florentine tradition - lunch with the Tuscan Schiacciata at the Antico Vinaio and the climb to Brunelleschi’s dome: for centuries the city has been the heart of cultural life not only of a state, but of a whole world, and you can’t leave it without first having observed closely its artistic history.
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