The Palazzo Pitti was originally built as a residence for the banker Luca Pitti, around the middle of fifteenth century, following a design by Brunelleschi. The Medici, who purchased the building a century later, commisioned Bartolomeo Ammannati (1558-1570) to enlarge it. Ammannati transformed two side doors into ground-floor windows, lengthened the facade, and created the most beautiful of Renaissance courtyards, the Cortile dell' Ammannati, in the interior of the Palazzo. In 1783 the Duke of Lorraine added the so-called "rondò", the beautiful side wing which juts out into the square (on the right). A second wing (on the left) was added in the nineteenth century.
Inside the Palazzo is the Galleria Palatina, containing works by Titian, Raphael, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Botticelli, Andrea del Sarto, Filippo Lippi, Perugino, Velazquez, van Dyck, and Rubens. The Galleria d'Arte Moderna contains a good selection of Italian paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including works by the Macchiaioli, a nineteenth-century school of Tuscan painters whose works were characterized by "macchie" or spots. The Museo degli Argenti displays silver, gold, stone, glass, and crystalware, as well as precious china.
The Collezione Contini-Bonacossi is located in the Palazzina della Meridiana. It contains works by Duccio da Boninsegna, Goya, and Veronese. Also located in the Palazzina is the Galleria del Costume, with rotating exhibits of clothing from different periods.
In the right wing of the Palazzo is the Museo delle Carrozze containing coaches from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Behind the Palazzo lie the famous Boboli Gardens, a vast and splendid Italian-style public garden which reflects, in every way, the taste of the high Renaissance period (masses of trees treated as architecture, lawns, grottos, fountains, etc.)
The Palazzo is also the site of temporary exhibitions.

Piazza de' Pitti. Phone: 23885
Open: 9-14. Closed Mondays.