Palazzo Vecchio: Inside the Building Where Florence Was Governed

Palazzo Vecchio is the rarest kind of monument: a building that has never stopped doing its job. It was the seat of Florentine government in 1299 and it is the city hall today, which means you are walking through working rooms rather than a reconstruction.

The Hall of the Five Hundred

The room was built in 1494 for the Great Council of the republic, then rebuilt and raised by Vasari for Cosimo I — the ceiling lifted, the walls covered with battle scenes celebrating Florentine victories over Pisa and Siena. It is a deliberate piece of political theatre: a republican hall converted into the audience chamber of a duke.

In the middle of it stands Michelangelo’s Genius of Victory. And somewhere behind Vasari’s frescoes, according to a theory that has never quite been settled, may lie what remains of Leonardo’s lost Battle of Anghiari.

The small rooms are the good rooms

• The Studiolo of Francesco I — a windowless cabinet of curiosities, painted floor to ceiling, built for a Medici prince who preferred alchemy to governing.
• The Chapel of Eleonora — Bronzino’s frescoes, among the finest surfaces in the building.
• The Map Room — fifty-three painted maps of the known world as Florence understood it in the 1560s.

Dante’s death mask

Kept here, and familiar to readers of Dan Brown’s Inferno, which used the palace as a setting. Whether or not the mask was taken from the poet’s face is disputed. It is still one of the quieter, stranger objects in the building.

Outside: Piazza della Signoria

The square is an open-air sculpture gallery and a map of Florentine power. The copy of the David at the palace door, Ammannati’s Neptune fountain, and under the Loggia dei Lanzi, Cellini’s bronze Perseus and Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabines — all placed to be read as statements, not decoration.

Visiting privately

Palazzo Vecchio works beautifully as an afternoon, and it is the best possible follow-up to a morning at the Uffizi or the Accademia: the same families, the same rivalries, seen from inside the building where the decisions were made.

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