Palazzo Vecchio

For over seven centuries this crenellated fortress-palace has housed the government of Florence, and it still does today. Palazzo Vecchio layers a hall built for five hundred citizens, frescoed Medici apartments, a buried Roman theatre and a ninety-five-metre tower into one civic museum on Piazza della Signoria.

Why it matters

The municipal culture portal calls the palace the symbol-monument of the city and the seat of its government for more than seven centuries — a claim few buildings anywhere can match. The name "the Old Palace" dates from the moment the Medici court moved out to Palazzo Pitti; it had been the priors' seat since the end of the thirteenth century — its oldest section is attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio — and it turned ducal residence in 1540, when Cosimo I de' Medici brought his court here. Giorgio Vasari's sixteenth-century remodelling wrapped the medieval core in ceremonial apartments, so a visit reads the city's political biography room by room.

What to notice

Start in the Salone dei Cinquecento, the great hall built from 1495 to a design attributed to il Cronaca for the Grand Council instituted under Savonarola's republic. Leonardo and Michelangelo were both commissioned to fresco its walls — neither painting survives — and the decoration carried out by Vasari's workshop now surrounds Michelangelo's marble Genius of Victory. Upstairs, the monumental quarters reward slow looking: the Studiolo of Francesco I, a windowless cabinet where the duke kept curiosities and documents; Eleonora of Toledo's chapel with its Bronzino frescoes; the Hall of Lilies with its carved fifteenth-century ceiling. Donatello's bronze Judith stands in the palace, and the ground-floor section "Tracce di Firenze" displays remains of the Roman theatre beneath it.

Context and history

Built between the end of the 1200s and the early fourteenth century for a republic that feared its own citizens as much as its enemies, the palace carries the scars of Florence's factions. The Salone dei Cinquecento was doubled in length for Cosimo I's court ceremonies, and Vasari's apartments turned republican rooms into Medici theatre — the political message was the decoration. Excavations under and around the palace revealed the Roman theatre of Florentia, adding an archaeological basement to the political storeys above.