Castles · Tour

The Palatina Alone in Two Hours, Fourteen People, No Boboli

Two hours at most, on the Palatine Gallery in the Pitti Palace, and nothing else on the itinerary. The skip-the-line ticket gets the group past the queue and into the palace the Medici grand dukes lived in. Raphael and Titian are here, along with the rest of the Renaissance collection, and the way it is hung is the point: floor to ceiling in the frescoed and stuccoed rooms, the way a private collection was displayed, not the way a museum arranges one. The guide covers the family alongside the paintings, since one paid for the other. The group is capped at fourteen, which in these rooms is the difference between hearing the guide and following a raised arm.