Loggia dei Lanzi & the Uffizi: Offices of Power

Why is it significant?

Stand where the great open arches of the Loggia dei Lanzi meet the start of the Uffizi, and look down the long, narrow courtyard between two grey colonnades to the river. Before it was the most famous art gallery in Italy, this was an office block... and its name still says so.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand where the great open arches of the Loggia dei Lanzi meet the start of the Uffizi, and look down the long, narrow courtyard between two grey colonnades to the river. Before it was the most famous art gallery in Italy, this was an office block... and its name still says so. Uffizi simply means offices.

Start with the loggia. It was built between 1376 and 1382 for the Republic's public ceremonies, a stage where the Signoria swore in magistrates and received ambassadors in front of the crowd. Two centuries later Duke Cosimo I de' Medici posted his German mercenary guards here, the Landsknechte, and Florentines shortened them to Lanzi. The Republic's ceremonial porch became the duke's guardhouse, and the name stuck.

Then, in 1560, Cosimo commissioned Giorgio Vasari to gather the magistracies of the old Republic, its guild offices and courts, under one roof right next to his palace. A whole medieval neighbourhood was knocked down to make room, and part of the ancient church of San Pier Scheraggio was swallowed into the new building. Vasari died in 1574 and others finished the job, while Cosimo's son Francesco I began turning the top floor into a gallery for the family's treasures.

Here is the irony. The institutions that once governed Florence still existed, with their old names and their old seals, but now they worked as clerks in the duke's corridor, within shouting distance of the ruler. Look along the pillars: the marble statues of famous Tuscans in the niches, Dante, Giotto, Galileo and Machiavelli among them, were added in the nineteenth century.

And under the loggia, Cellini's bronze Perseus, unveiled in 1554, holds up the severed head of Medusa. Many read it as a message from the new regime to anyone still dreaming of the Republic. Now walk the length of the colonnade down to the river, turn left along the Lungarno, and stop at the palace on the corner of a small square.