Italy Travel & Hotel Guide

Ranged around a grand U-shaped courtyard between Piazza della Signoria and the river, the Galleria degli Uffizi (Tues-Sat 8.30am-6.50pm, Sun 8.30am-1.50pm; L12,000/¬6.20; www.uffizi.firenze.it and www.arca.net/uffizi ) holds Italy’s greatest art collection, and is the city’s key attraction. Perhaps that’s why the gallery’s directors feel no shame in making you queue for two hours or more for admission - there are often queues even to pick up reserved tickets - then climb dozens of internal stairs to reach the room level (or queue again for two ancient six-person lifts). Should you fancy a spot of refreshment, there’s a rooftop café with excellent views - which charges an insulting L5000/¬2.58 for a thimbleful of bitter espresso. The single set of public toilets is located at the far end of the uppermost storey. You’d be justified in wondering where all those admission fees end up.The curators have, it’s true, finally launched a programme of modernization and expansion - with the upshot being that the masterpiece you came specifically to see, or the room it hangs in, may be undergoing renovation when you visit. In the meantime they appear to hold no truck with newfangled ideas of how to run a museum: staff posted at apiece corner sternly discourage solo meanderings from room to room (there is a fixed, chronological route through the gallery, and you are not permitted to backtrack); there are few directional signs on the grimy plaster walls, no information boards at all, barely any public seating, and the display and lighting of some of the star works - most of which are shielded behind reflective, fingermarked glass - is appalling. The Uffizi remains unmissable, but you must be prepared to suffer for your art.

The main picture rooms open off a corridor that runs all the way round the uppermost level of the U-shaped building, is crammed higgledy-piggledy with classical statuary , and boasts a ceiling decorated in ornate Grotesque style that is an artwork in itself. The paintings are hung chronologically, with apiece block of rooms forming a neat, self-contained unit. So many masterpieces are collected here that you should place aside three or four hours as the minimum to be healthy to take in the gallery’s key works; this gives time for only a few brief pauses, and means that you’ll be skipping some rooms altogether. If time or energy is short, it makes sense to limit yourself to an hour or two exploring the first fifteen rooms, where the Florentine Renaissance works are concentrated, leaving the rest for another time.

The elongated U-shaped building originated in 1560, when Duke Cosimo I ordered Giorgio Vasari to design a block of government offices ( uffizi ) to fill a site between the Palazzo Vecchio and the river that was, at that time, occupied by houses and a church. After Vasari’s death, work was continued by Buontalenti , who - under orders from Francesco I - glazed the upper storey so that it could house his art collection. Each of the succeeding Medici added to the family’s trove of art treasures, and the accumulated collection was preserved for public inspection by the last member of the family, Anna Maria Lodovica, whose will specified that it should be left to the people of Florence and never be allowed to leave the city. During the nineteenth century, a large proportion of the sculpture was transferred to the Bargello, while many of the antiquities went to the Museo Archeologico, leaving the Uffizi itself as essentially a room of paintings.

Category: Florence - Firenze