The
houses rising around Palazzo Pitti, which include also “Toscanella house”
have medieval origins.
These houses still have well preserved
underground wineries and craft workshops, as well as wells, tanks and
courtyards.
This area was called "dell'Oltrarno"
because it was just outside the walls on the hill known as "Bogoli" (Today
Boboli).
It was Luca Pitti, a rich Florentine
merchant and banker, always rival of the Medici family (famous dynasty that
ruled the city of Florence for several centuries) who wanted to build a
building that was larger in size and more sumptuous that the same Medici
dwelling.
The works were started in 1458 by Luca
Fancelli according on a project by the famous architect and his master
Filippo Brunelleschi. It took into account a central body with seven windows
on two floors and 3 portals, covered with big rusticated stones.
Luca Pitti wanted that the whole Medici
Palace could get into the square outside the palace and that its windows
were larger than the main door of the Medici palace itself.
The Pittis lived at Palazzo Pitti
starting from 1469, despite the works had stopped a few years before,
because of the impoverishment of the family.
The legend tells that Elisa, Luca’s
daughter, desperately fell in love with Lorenzo, known as the "wonderful",
Piero de Medici’s son, and that the two lovers, hindered by his father, met
secretly at one of their friend’s house, perhaps our own "Toscanella house".
Lorenzo, officially asked for her
hand, but Piero opposed their marriage and so it was that Luca Pitti made an
ambush against Piero who escaped and saved his life. Luca was arrested and
died in prison in 1472.
In 1549 the building was sold by the
Pitti family to Cosimo I and his wife Eleonora of Toledo who, suffering from
tuberculosis, and thinking that the Oltrarno area was healthier that the
city center, chose it as her main residence, giving rise to the rebirth of
the Oltrarno neighbourhoods while the noble families of the city imitating
them, settled there.
It was the famous Florentine architect
Bartolomeo Ammannati that starting from 1560 enlarged the building while
maintaining the style and creating the internal courtyard with several
floors, the monumental staircase and the attached garden of Boboli, one of
the first examples of "garden in the Italian style".
In 1565 Vasari built the famous "Vasari
corridor" that going along Ponte Vecchio, connected Palazzo Pitti to Palazzo
Vecchio allowing the Medici to go to work bypassing the city streets, so
being safe from any attacks or revolts.
After hosting six generations of the
Medici family, it was under the Lorena that Palazzo Pitti found its current
arrangement with the addition of the two side wings between '700 and '800.
Today it houses some of the most
important museums:
- The Palatine Gallery, which hosts
paintings by Raphael (Madonna of the chair and the Veiled), Caravaggio,
Titian, Tintoretto, the foreigners Rubens, Van Dycke, Murillo;
- The Gallery of Modern Art, with
works by the Italian Macchiaioli;
- The Silver Museum, which hosts a
collection of precious objects once belonging to the Medici;
-
The Costume Gallery.
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