Last-minute Uffizi tickets
Access to the Uffizi Gallery, Florence has become increasingly hard to come by of late, as demand for tickets regularly outstrips supply. www.tickitaly.com has a selection of last-minute offers so – if you’re heading to Florence in the next few days and want to get in to the Uffizi – you should pay a visit to the site.
Florence’s Uffizi Gallery (more correctly the Polo Museale Fiorentino) is one of the world’s great collections of painting, indeed ‘the world’s greatest collection of Renaissance painting’ according to the Rough Guide to Tuscany. Find out about tickets for the Uffizi here. How appropriate then, that this magnificent museum should be in Florence, the cradle of the European Renaissance.
More appropriate still, the Uffizi was commissioned Cosimo I di Medici: the Medici were of course the all-powerful and fabulously rich merchant family who ruled Florence at its height in the Middle Ages. The Medici were to help make Florence wealthy, but just as importantly they were to spend that wealth on commissioning artists to decorate the houses and public offices of their city. Without the likes of the Medici, there might have been no Giotto, Raphael or Titian. Leonardo might have been a forgotten local artist operating out of Vinci, and Botticelli might have been executing likenesses of tradesmen’s daughters for a few pence a pop.
But the artisan-painter rose to fame under the patronage of the ruling families in the rich northern Italian cities of Milan, Rome, Verona and Mantua and others. And nowhere more so than Florence and the Uffizi, where art, trade and government had to learn to rub shoulders. For though the Uffizi appears a grand, historic palace to our eyes, it has roots far more mundane. ‘Uffizi’ is simply the Italian for ‘offices’ and this palazzo, begun in 1560 by architect Giorgio di Vasari, was designed as the administrative headquarters for the magistrates of Florence. The Medici would use part of the building for storing excess paintings denied wallspace.
It was only with the decline of the ruling family that the pictures and the ‘gallery’ came into the public domain. Visitors had been allowed by special permission since the 1500s, but in 1765 the Uffizi became a public gallery. The irony is that there still isn’t enough wall space (the Medici were exceptionally acquisitive) and much of the collection is rotated to other Florentine galleries such as the Bargello. Work is currently going on to expand the exhibition space. The Polo Museale Fiorentino therefore gets busy and it sells out, so we strongly advise you to buy your Uffizi tickets before you leave home.
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