Royal Apartments: A Journey Through Dynasties

 

The Royal Apartments of the Pitti Palace complex has reopened its doors after five years of meticulous restoration, offering the public the opportunity to participate in a guided tour of the 14 rooms on Tuesdays to Sundays from 10 am – 6 pm, with the last tour starting at 5 pm. Admission to the Pitti Palace museums costs €16, and visitors must sign up at the Palatine Gallery to participate in a tour, which takes place on the hour. Guests will have the chance to see the Green Room, the Throne Room, the Celestial Drawing Room, the chapel, the Parrot Room, the Queen’s drawing room, the Oval Cabinet, the Round Cabinet, the King’s bed chambers, the King’s study, the red lounge, and the King’s waiting room.

The ruling dynasties of the Medici, Lorraine, and Savoy have all left their mark on the royal apartments. When the last Medici died in 1743, a member of the Lorraine family came to rule Florence and Tuscany, followed by the House of Savoy when Italy became a unified country and Florence with its capital from 1865 – 71.

Grand Duke Cosimo II de Medici moved to the Pitti Palace with his Spanish wife Eleonora de Toledo, with the Boboli gardens becoming the playground for their 10 children. The last resident, King Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, gave the apartments, along with the Boboli Gardens, to the state in 1919. The decorative style of the apartments is mixed and reflects the eras and tastes of the personalities and dynasties that have inhabited them over the centuries. Art and artifacts of the Medici legacy and of the long Lorraine interlude coexist harmoniously in the apartments, which is sealed by the definitive contribution of the Savoy family, who brought furnishings from the royal palaces of almost all the other annexed territories. 

The reopening is happing thanks to the precise work, lasting many months, which delivers to visitors an amazing result – a journey through time of one of the most identifiable places in Italian history, characterised by a stratification of styles that has remained substantially untouched over the centuries until today. A few changes have been made since 2020: some pieces have been arranged differently and new paintings have been introduced which were previously kept in storage. The intention is to better highlight the Medici phase, when the apartment was inhabited by the Grand Prince Ferdinand. (Mina Lozanova)