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Great Discoveries "Personal Tour Guides" will provide you with the most enjoyable and informative way to visit the Palazzo Vecchio. Our carefully researched tour identifies and locates the most relevant treasures to ensure that you do not miss important works and that you clearly understand each items artistic and historic significance. As you view these carefully selected treasures, our professional narrators, accompanied by historically appropriate background music, will delight, amuse and inform you, making your visit a most memorable experience. Learn about the Old Palace's remarkable history as the seat of Florentine, Tuscan and Italian governments with informative descriptions, photo's, building diagram, sample audio tracks and more.
Domination is what this building is all about, with its protruding battlements giving it the appearance of a fortress. The 308 foot high tower was built flush with these battlements to make it appear even taller and more imposing. The original bell tower, the de' Foraboschi tower, was considered insufficient and in 1310 it was replaced by a second tower built on the old tower's shaft. This new tower, the Arnolfo Tower, contains additional protrusions in the form of a walkway around its perimeter, much like the battlements below, and it would remain the highest point in the city for hundreds of years to come.
The room at the top of the tower, used as a prison for political and other important people, became known as the Alberghettino, which literally means ‘the little hotel’. Exalted inmates of the little hotel have included the likes of Cosimo the Elder, before his brief exile, and Savonarola. Savonarola, the tyrannical priest famous for his bonfires of the vanity, spent his last months here enjoying a superb view of the city before he was hanged and burned to death in the Piazza della Signoria below.
After the move to the Pitti Palace, the palazzo lost its importance as the exclusive seat of the city’s political government until 1848 when the Lorraine family, the successors of the Medici’s, fell from power. At that time, the palace regained some of its earlier stature by becoming the seat of Italy’s new provisional government. From 1865 through 1871 Florence was the capital of the new United Kingdom of Italy and this building, where the Chamber of Deputies met, was the nexus of all the countries political happenings. The Senate sat next door in the Uffizi, which in Italian means office. The two buildings were linked together by an overhead passageway, which runs above Via della Ninna. In 1872, the Capital of Italy was moved to Rome and from that time on the building continued its political life as the seat of the Florentine City Government.
Although the palace today contains the offices of Florence’s Mayor and City Council, much of it is open to the public including the Hall of the 500, the little Study of Francesco I and two of the three spectacular apartments. The Quarters of Pope Leo X are being used to house Florence’s City Council and as reception rooms for the mayor. The Hall of the 200 is being used for City Council meetings and is therefore not always open to the public.
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The Palazzo Vecchio, for centuries the seat of Florentine governments, is a prototypical Florentine building that has dominated
the
Changes
to the Florentine constitution and its governments necessitated
many alterations to the layout of the palace. The most radical was
in 1540 when Duke Cosimo I de Medici moved his entourage here from
the Palazzo Medici and built a huge extension onto the rear. The
Medici remained in residence for only nine years before moving across
the Arno River to the Pitti Palace, largely, it seems, at the insistence
of Cosimo’s Spanish wife, Eleanora of Toledo. They gave the
palace to their eldest son Francesco I, at which time it acquired
its present name the Palazzo Vecchio, meaning the old palace.
for your first sample before playing the second sample, or you
will not hear it.
