Pitti Palace - Florence - Italy

The Pitti Palace is a huge Renaissance palace. It was erected in Oltrarno (west bank of the Arno River), near the Ponte Vecchio.

The construction of this building, serious and severe, was commissioned in 1458 by Luca Pitti, a Florentine banker, adherent and associate of Cosimo de Medici. The early history of the Palazzo Pitti is a mixture of facts and myths. It is said that Pitt and had instructed that the windows are wider than the door through which one entered the Palazzo Medici. The art historian Giorgio Vasari in the sixteenth century assumed that Brunelleschi, assisted by his pupil Luca Fancelli, was the architect of the palace, but today it is considered that Fancelli was the real architect.


While it is extraordinary, the original palace cannot compete with the Florentine Medici residences, neither height or in content. Whatever may have been the architect of the Palazzo Pitti, it goes against current trends. The rustic stone work gives the palace an austere and powerful impression reinforced by the three sets of seven arched openings, reminiscent of a Roman aqueduct. The Florentines of the time, fans of a new style all'antica are delighted by this architecture inspired by ancient Rome. This original design has withstood the test of time, repetition of the facades are included with each new addition adjoining the palace and found their influence in several times or imitations of sixteenth-nineteenth century.


The 140 rooms open to the public are part of an interior, designed mostly later than the original part of the building, and created in two stages, the first and second in the seventeenth to the early eighteenth century. In 2005, the discovery by chance, bathrooms of eighteenth century reveal remarkable examples of plumbing whose style is quite similar to those in the bathrooms of the twenty-first century. The Pitti Palace is the residence of the Holy Roman Empire and later
Napoleon used the palace during his control of Italy.