Palazzo Pitti: The Banker Who Wanted Bigger Windows
Why is it significant?
Stand at the bottom of the sloping square and take in the facade in front of you: more than two hundred metres of rough, honey-coloured stone blocks, three storeys of identical arched windows, and no decoration at all. It does not try to charm you. It tries to overwhelm you.
Key Facts
| Place | Palazzo Pitti: The Banker Who Wanted Bigger Windows |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza de' Pitti 1, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.76530, 11.25030 |
| Part of Walk | Florence Across the Arno: Oltrarno Artisans, Santo Spirito & San Frediano |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand at the bottom of the sloping square and take in the facade in front of you: more than two hundred metres of rough, honey-coloured stone blocks, three storeys of identical arched windows, and no decoration at all. It does not try to charm you. It tries to overwhelm you.
It began as a statement of rivalry. In the 1450s Luca Pitti, a wealthy banker and an ally turned rival of the Medici, commissioned a palace that would dwarf theirs. Tradition says the design came from Brunelleschi, and a famous anecdote adds a delicious detail: Pitti wanted windows as big as the doors of the Medici palace. Whether he said it or not, the original block was only the central seven bays of what you see now.
Pride came before a fall. The Pitti family lost money and influence, and in 1549 the palace was sold to Eleonora of Toledo, the wife of Cosimo de' Medici. The Medici moved across the river, extended the building, laid out the Boboli Gardens behind it, and connected it to their offices through Vasari's raised corridor. So the house built to humiliate the Medici became the Medici's home for almost two centuries.
It never stopped being a royal palace. After the Medici came the Lorraine Grand Dukes, then Napoleon's sister Elisa, and between 1865 and 1871, when Florence was the capital of Italy, King Victor Emmanuel the Second lived here. And in the same years, in a modest flat on this very square, a Russian writer short of money was finishing a novel. Fyodor Dostoevsky completed The Idiot in Florence, and a plaque on the square remembers him.
Notice how the square slopes up to the palace, so that you always approach it from below, slightly out of breath. That is no accident. Now turn your back on the facade and walk north along Via de' Guicciardini, towards the river, until a small church square opens on your right.