Palazzo Pitti

Luca Pitti wanted the biggest palace in Florence, and he wanted it bigger than anything the Medici had. The ambitious banker commissioned this massive rusticated stone facade in 1458, reportedly insisting the windows be larger than the doors of the Medici palazzo. He nearly bankrupted himself in the process, and the irony is exquisite: the Medici bought the unfinished building in 1549 for a fraction of what it cost to build.

Under the Medici, and later the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty, the Pitti became the grandest residence in Tuscany. Napoleon used it as his Florentine power base during his Italian campaigns. When Italy unified, it briefly served as the royal palace of the new kingdom — King Victor Emmanuel III didn't hand it over to the nation until 1919. The horseshoe amphitheater in the courtyard behind the palace sits in the exact spot where the hill was quarried for the building stone — they literally dug the palace out of the ground it sits on.

Today it contains five separate museums, including the Palatine Gallery with works by Raphael, Titian, and Caravaggio hung in the ornate style of the original collection — floor to ceiling, frame touching frame, the way aristocrats displayed art before museums invented white walls and spot lighting. The Gallery of Modern Art upstairs holds Italian Impressionist works that most visitors never reach because they're exhausted from the Palatine rooms below.

The palace opens directly onto the Boboli Gardens behind, making the entire complex a small city unto itself. From Pitti's windows, the Medici could survey their garden, their corridor to the Uffizi, and their entire city beyond — the view of absolute power made architectural.