Piazza Pitti and Pitti Palace

Piazza de’ Pitti, almost entirely dominated by the palace’s imposing rusticated façade, is one of the Oltrarno’s most beautiful squares and has been pedestrianised in recent years. Besides the Boboli Gardens, the Pitti complex contains five museums: the Palatine Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art, Treasury of the Grand Dukes, Museum of Fashion and Costume, and Porcelain Museum. The palace arose in what was then a secondary part of the city, at the foot of the Boboli hill. In the mid-fifteenth century Luca Fancelli, a pupil of Brunelleschi, designed it for the banker Luca Pitti, a rival of the Medici. In 1549 the Medici grand-ducal family, through Eleonora of Toledo, wife of Cosimo I, purchased the complex and the earliest Boboli garden. Palace and garden were greatly enlarged, becoming the most prestigious residence of the Medici and their successors: the Habsburg-Lorraine family, with a Napoleonic interlude under Elisa Baciocchi, and the Savoys when Florence was Italy’s capital. Giulio Parigi extended the façade in 1620. In the eighteenth century the Lorraine rulers built the two side wings enclosing today’s gently sloping forecourt, further emphasising its grandeur. Other important buildings on the square include Palazzo Guicciardini and Palazzo Temple Leader. Plaques mark the homes of notable residents: at number 18, Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, the astronomer who inspired Christopher Columbus; at number 2, Fyodor Dostoevsky, who worked here on The Idiot. Nearby is Casa Guidi, the house museum where the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning lived.