Palazzo Vecchio

A fortress-like block of rough-cut stone, crowned with projecting battlements and a slender tower rising 94 metres above Piazza della Signoria, the Palazzo Vecchio has been the seat of Florentine government for more than seven centuries and still houses the city's mayor. Behind its severe medieval face lies a sequence of Renaissance courtyards, painted halls and private apartments that record how a merchant republic became a Medici duchy.

The commune decided to build a palace for its magistrates in 1299, and the work is attributed to Arnolfo di Cambio, the architect also associated with the cathedral and Santa Croce. He set the building on land once owned by the Ghibelline Uberti family, so that their houses could never rise there again, and incorporated an older family tower into the base of the new one, which is why the tower stands off centre. Its cells held Cosimo the Elder in 1435 and the friar Girolamo Savonarola in 1498. The rusticated walls are pierced by paired Gothic windows, and under the battlements runs a band of painted coats of arms of the republic. In 1540 Duke Cosimo I de' Medici moved into the building; when the court later shifted across the Arno to Palazzo Pitti, the palace became the "old" one, and the name stuck. Between 1865 and 1871, when Florence was briefly the capital of Italy, it housed the national government.

Inside, the first courtyard was remodelled by Michelozzo in 1453 and painted in 1565 with views of Austrian cities for the marriage of Francesco de' Medici and Joanna of Austria. Vasari's staircase rises to the Salone dei Cinquecento, a hall about 52 metres long built in 1494 for the republic's Great Council and later raised and redecorated by Vasari and his workshop between 1555 and 1572, with battle scenes on the walls and 39 painted panels in the ceiling. Leonardo and Michelangelo were both commissioned to paint battles here; neither work survived. The hall holds Michelangelo's marble Genius of Victory, and off it opens the windowless studiolo of Francesco I. Upstairs are the gilded ceilings of the priors' rooms, Domenico Ghirlandaio's frescoes in the Hall of Lilies, where Donatello's bronze Judith and Holofernes now stands, Bronzino's chapel for Eleonora of Toledo, and the wardrobe room with 53 painted maps on its cupboard doors. Outside the door, a copy of Michelangelo's David stands where the original was placed in 1504.

Getting there

The palace stands on Piazza della Signoria in the historic centre of Florence, about 1.3 km from the city centre point and about 1 km from Firenze Santa Maria Novella railway station. Florence Airport, Peretola (FLR) is about 6 km to the north-west.