Galleria dell'Accademia: Michelangelo's David

Why is it significant?

The queue along Via Ricasoli tells you what is inside before any sign does. Beyond the door, at the end of a long hall lit from above, a marble giant stands under a dome built just for him, a sling over his shoulder, his weight on one leg, frowning at something only he can see.

Key Facts

Open the walk

The queue along Via Ricasoli tells you what is inside before any sign does. Beyond the door, at the end of a long hall lit from above, a marble giant stands under a dome built just for him, a sling over his shoulder, his weight on one leg, frowning at something only he can see.

When Michelangelo finished David in 1504, nobody wanted to put him on a cathedral buttress any more; he was simply too good. A committee was called to decide where he should stand, and it included Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli and Perugino. They chose the front of the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of the republic, so the young hero who beat a giant became a warning to tyrants. Moving him there took four days, and the story goes that Medici supporters threw stones at him along the way.

He is more than five metres tall, and if he looks slightly odd from close up, it is deliberate: the head and hands are oversized, because he was meant to be seen from far below. Notice that he is not celebrating. This is the moment before the fight, the frown, the tense neck, the stone hidden in his right hand. In 1527, during a riot, a bench thrown from a palace window broke his left arm into three pieces, and two teenage apprentices, one of them Giorgio Vasari, gathered the fragments so it could be repaired.

By the nineteenth century rain and frost were eating into the marble, so in 1873 David was moved indoors. The tribune you see was designed for him by Emilio De Fabris, the same architect who gave the cathedral its marble facade. A copy has stood outside the Palazzo Vecchio since 1910. Along the hall, Michelangelo's unfinished Prisoners, carved for the tomb of Pope Julius the Second, seem to be fighting their way out of the stone.

And so this walk comes full circle. You began at a pair of doors that a young Brunelleschi lost, saw the dome he built instead, and stood in the yard where a reject block of marble became this. Florence has always been a city of competitions, second chances and stubborn young men. Take your time with him... he has waited more than five hundred years for you.