Handpicked experience · Florence
Florence, Italy
A Medici civil-service building whose top floor never emptied, a kilometre of private corridor over the river, and the will that forbade any of it leaving Florence.
Visit one of the oldest and most famous art museums in the world, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
Discover the secrets and jewels in the Uffizi!
The’s Uffizi Gallery is home to some of the most famous masterpieces from the Italian Renaissance!
Admire the beauty Botticelli’s iconic Birth of Venus painting
A reserved slot rather than the general queue
Two floors of Italian painting from gold-ground panels to the high Renaissance
The building itself, purpose-built for a Medici bureaucracy
Staff on hand at the door to sort out entry
Entry to the Uffizi in Florence with a reserved time slot, so the wait at the door is short and the visit begins on your own terms. The collection runs from gold-ground panels of the thirteenth century through to the Renaissance rooms the building is famous for.
You go in, and after that the day is yours. Most people spend two to three hours; the galleries occupy the upper floors of a long horseshoe, so the route is essentially one loop out and one loop back, with the Arno at the far end. There is no guide, which means no fixed pace and no group to keep up with.
The name simply means "the offices". Cosimo I had the building put up from 1560 to house the magistrates and guilds of his state — a civil service headquarters, planned by Giorgio Vasari, the painter who also wrote the first proper history of Italian art. The Medici kept the top floor for themselves and filled it with the things they had been collecting for generations. The bureaucrats moved out over time; the collection never did.
Vasari also built a raised passage nearly a kilometre long, running from the palace on one bank, along the top of the Uffizi, across the river above the shops on the old bridge and out to the gardens on the other side. It was finished in about five months for a wedding in 1565, and it let the ruling family cross the whole city without setting foot in the street. The butchers who traded on that bridge were evicted soon afterwards and replaced with goldsmiths, on the grounds that the smell rose.
When the last of the Medici line died in 1743, Anna Maria Luisa had already signed everything over to the Tuscan state, with one condition: none of it could ever leave Florence. That single clause is why a family collection assembled over two centuries is still in the city it was made for, rather than scattered across the auction rooms of Europe.
In 1817 Stendhal walked out of a Florentine church shaking, overwhelmed by too much art at once. A Florentine psychiatrist gave the reaction his name in the 1970s after treating a run of visitors with the same symptoms. It is a real and mildly comic hazard here, and the cure is a bench, water and a smaller number of rooms.
Timed entry means arriving inside a set window. Bags go through a check at the door, and large ones cannot come in. Cancellation is free up to a day ahead.
Open it to pick a date and work out the price.
What the fare covers, and what to budget for separately.
The practical detail, and the answers people actually ask for.
Because the word means "the offices". Cosimo I built it from 1560 as a headquarters for the magistrates and guilds of his state, and the family kept the top floor for their collection.
Most stay a couple of hours, though nothing caps it. Rooms run broadly in chronological order, which makes it easy to slow down where you want and move briskly where you don't.
A raised passage of almost a kilometre that Vasari built in about five months for a wedding in 1565, letting the ruling family walk from the palace to the far bank without entering the street.
The butchers who traded there were evicted shortly after the corridor was built, on the grounds that the smell rose into it, and goldsmiths took the shops instead.
Because the transfer to the Tuscan state carried a clause forbidding removal. Nothing in the bequest could be sold abroad or broken up, which is rare for a dynastic collection of that size.
The dizzy, overwhelmed reaction the writer described after a Florentine church visit in 1817, named by a local psychiatrist in the 1970s. A bench, some water and fewer rooms is the usual cure.
No — this is a self-guided visit, so nothing dictates your route or how long you stand in front of anything.