Castles · Tour

One Facade, Four Dynasties Inside: Pitti, Medici, Habsburg, Savoy

With a licensed guide, the Palatina Gallery first: Raphael, Titian, Artemisia Gentileschi, Van Dyck, Rubens and Caravaggio, hung in the apartments they were collected for rather than in a museum. Then, after a short break, the Boboli Gardens, one of the first Italian Renaissance gardens ever laid out. The Pitti is the grandest private Renaissance palace there is. It was enlarged repeatedly over the centuries and the exterior never changed, which is the strange part. The rooms inside did, and they changed with whoever was living in them: the Pitti, then the Medici, then the Habsburgs, then the Savoy, the royal house of Italy. Four dynasties behind one unaltered front. What fills those rooms, the paintings, the furniture, the frescoes and the sculpture, is the record of how seriously the Medici took art, and of what happens when power and imagination are handled by the same people.