Oltrarno Artisans and Santo Spirito

Palazzo Pitti

The colossal rusticated palace begun by banker Luca Pitti in 1458 and turned into the grand ducal seat of the Medici, now five museums in one.

You're standing on the sloping piazza in front of Florence's largest palace. The building began in 1458 as the private home of Luca Pitti, a banker who wanted his windows bigger than the doors of the Medici palace across the river. Those giant rusticated blocks give the facade the look of a fortress, but this was pure domestic ambition. Pitti ran out of money before the roof went on and died in 1472 with the palace unfinished.

In 1549 Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de' Medici, bought the shell for nine thousand florins and turned it into the grand ducal residence. Her architects doubled it, added the courtyard, and laid out the Boboli Gardens behind. Three dynasties lived here: the Medici, the Habsburg-Lorraine, and the Savoy kings, including Victor Emmanuel II when Florence was briefly Italy's capital. Since 1919 it has belonged to the Italian state.

Today it holds five museums, but the facade you're looking at is still Luca Pitti's boast, three rows of seven arched windows repeated across the whole front.

Basilica di Santo Spirito

Brunelleschi's 1444 church on Piazza Santo Spirito, with Michelangelo's teenage wooden crucifix in the sacristy.

Brunelleschi began this church in 1444, two years before his death, and it is his clearest statement of how a Renaissance interior should feel: a long hall of pietra serena columns, soft light, and side chapels paid for by Florentine families. The outside was left plain on purpose, so step through the door and let the space open around you. Then find the sacristy, designed by Giuliano da Sangallo. In it hangs a painted wooden crucifix carved around 1492, when Michelangelo was about eighteen.

After the death of his patron Lorenzo de' Medici, the friars here gave the young sculptor a room and permission to study anatomy in the convent hospital. In thanks, he carved this Christ, naked and relaxed in death, the ribs and knees understood from real bodies. The work was lost from view for centuries, recognized again only in the 1960s, and returned here in 2000. The body that later became the David begins in this small carved figure.