Palazzo Pitti

Begun around 1458 by Luca Fancelli for banker Luca Pitti, Palazzo Pitti in Florence was meant to surpass the neighboring Medici palace in size. The austere rusticated stone façade, the asymmetrical windows of the first project, and the Boboli hill below compose a residence that changes masters when the Medici buy out the builder's debt. From Cosimo I to Leopold, each generation expands the complex. Today museums, gardens and royal apartments form one of Italy's vastest palatial ensembles.

The emphatic rustication — rough stone blocks on the ground floor, finer as the façade rises — becomes a Florentine signature that the Medici adopt by amplifying it. Bartolomeo Ammannati adds in the sixteenth century the quadrilateral courtyard and extends the façade toward the Arno. Begun around 1458 by Luca Fancelli for banker Luca Pitti, Palazzo Pitti in Florence was meant to surpass the neighboring Medici palace in size.

The Boboli Gardens, terraces, grottoes, open-air theater, serve as laboratory for Italian garden art, later copied at Versailles. Inside, the Palatine Gallery preserves Raphaels, Titians, Rubenses in rooms still decorated in the old fashion. The austere rusticated stone façade, the asymmetrical windows of the first project, and the Boboli hill below compose a residence that changes masters when the Medici buy out the builder's debt.

The palazzo illustrates the shift in Florentine power: from an oligarchic republic to a ducal court that absorbs its rivals' ambitions by converting them into decor. Pitti wanted to crush the Medici; the Medici transformed his house into a throne. From Cosimo I to Leopold, each generation expands the complex.