UFFIZI GALLERY

"If you know where to look, Florence is heaven" (Inferno, Dan Brown)

View of the Florence Cathedral from the Uffizi (photo by Carlotta Ceccarini)

In the cradle of culture, birthplace of Dante Alighieri, a magnet that revolves around the Medici Lordship, capable of attracting the most illustrious artists, humanists, philosophers, writers and poets. From Michelangelo to Galilei, from Botticelli to Brunelleschi, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Macchiavelli, they all passed through the paradise of art and culture. Florence, the city of the lily, is also the mother of one of the most famous museums in the world, the Uffizi, which today are riding the wave of social media and are becoming the protagonists of a millennium aimed at technology between criticism and appreciation.

A museum complex that not only houses the gallery but also protects the Vasari Corridor, Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens within its walls. Born at the behest of Duke Cosimo I de Medici who entrusted the important task to the architect Giorgio Vasari in about 1560. In the following years, the architectural complex was enlarged by the heirs of the Medici family to house their collection which became more and more profitable over the decades, a symbol of their power and wealth, which made the Uffizi Gallery one of the oldest museums in the Europe.

Cameos and medals, precious stones and goldsmiths, armor and weapons, scientific and geographical instruments, drawings and prints, porcelain, are just some of the artistic mediums that risk the rooms of this imposing museum, but certainly it is the paintings and statues that act as protagonists of the art scene and which have made the Uffizi Galleries one of the most famous museums in the world.

Doric architecture unfolds in a series of rooms that tell the history of Italian art and beyond, from the Middle Ages to the 1500s and 1600s.

The collection, already noteworthy with the Medici, faces a more international panorama with the Lorraine dynasty, which, in 1769, opened the gallery to the general public. It was in these years that the most famous masterpieces of Tiziano, Giovanni Bellini, Durer and Giorgione arrived in the museum today.

Many of the original works of the museum complex went to meet the Napoleonic exodus and never saw a return, just as many were instead protected from the bombings of the world wars and made visible again.

Giotto's enthroned majesties, natural in composition and essential in detail, the war scenes by Paolo Uccello celebrating the Battle of San Romano (1435-1440) and the unsaddling of Bernardino della Carda, the madonnas with children by Filippo Lippi and Parmigianino, the angels with dark backgrounds by Rosso Fiorentino, follow one another through the halls and corridors of the gallery. But the most loved and well-known works that everyone flocks to see and photograph are the diptych of the Dukes of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza by Piero della Francesca (1473-1475), the Spring (1480) and the Birth of Venus ( 1485) by Botticelli, the Annunciation by Leonardo da Vinci (1472), the Tondo Doni or the Holy Family by Michelangelo (1505-1506), the Madonna with the Goldfinch by Raphael (1506), the Venere di Urbino by Titian ( 1538), Bacchus by Caravaggio (1598) and Judith who beheads Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi (1620).

Photos made by Carlotta Ceccarini