Uffizi

• 1. Introduction

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  The Uffizi Gallery sits beside the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, at the edge of one of the world's most celebrated public squares. It began not as a museum but as a place to file paperwork. Giorgio Vasari started construction in 1560 on orders from Cosimo I de' Medici, and the whole point was bureaucratic: bring the city's scattered committees, agencies, and guilds under one roof. The very word uffizi means offices. Yet inside those administrative corridors, something else was quietly taking shape. The Medici family filled the top floor with Roman sculptures, then commissioned a special octagonal room to show off their finest masterpieces. Guests on the Grand Tour came and stared. By the sixteenth century, visitors were already asking to be let in. How does a government filing building become one of the most visited art galleries on the planet? And what happens to a priceless collection when a dynasty dies out, a car bomb goes off in the street outside, and climate activists reach for the glue?

• 2. A Building Born from Power

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  Vasari broke ground in 1560, and the project was finished in 1581, with Alfonso Parigi and Bernardo Buontalenti completing the work after Vasari. The courtyard they produced is so long and so narrowly proportioned that architectural historians treat it as the first regularized streetscape in Europe. Vasari, who was a painter as well as an architect, amplified the sense of depth deliberately. Continuous roof cornices ran unbroken along the matching facades, and unbroken cornices also separated the storeys. Three continuous steps ran along the entire front of the building. The far end of the courtyard opened toward the Arno through a Doric screen, articulating the space without closing it off. The niches in the piers, which alternated with columns of the Loggiato, remained empty until the nineteenth century, when they were filled with sculptures of famous artists. Cosimo I also brought the state archive, the Archivio di Stato, into the same complex, consolidating administrative and documentary power in one address. His son, Grand Duke Francesco I, took the next step and turned the piano nobile into a display space for the finest works in the Medici collections.

• 3. The Tribuna and the Grand Tour

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  Grand Duke Francesco I commissioned Buontalenti to design a single room that would concentrate the Medici's greatest possessions. That room, the Tribuna degli Uffizi, was completed in 1584. Octagonal in shape, it displayed a series of masterpieces alongside jewels, and it became a celebrated stop on the Grand Tour, drawing aristocratic travelers from across Europe. Over the following decades, more sections of the building were gradually recruited for paintings and sculptures that the Medici had collected or commissioned. For many years, between 45 and 50 rooms held paintings spanning the thirteenth through the eighteenth century. The gallery had been accessible to visitors by request since the sixteenth century, and in 1769 it was officially opened to the public. Formal museum status came in 1865. The decisive moment for the collection's survival came after the last Medici heiress, Anna Maria Luisa, negotiated the Patto di famiglia, or "family pact," which transferred the entire collection to the city of Florence when the ruling House of Medici died out.

• 4. Expansion and Record Crowds

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  A major expansion project finished in 2006 nearly doubled the available exhibition space, adding roughly 6,000 square metres and bringing the total to almost 13,000 square metres. That allowed artworks that had long sat in storage to be displayed for the first time. The Nuovi Uffizi renovation project, which started in 1989, moved through a productive phase between 2015 and 2017. Its goals included modernizing every hall, more than doubling the display space, adding a new exit, and upgrading lighting, air conditioning, and security. The museum stayed open throughout, closing individual rooms as needed and moving art temporarily. The Botticelli rooms and two adjacent galleries containing early Renaissance paintings closed for 15 months before reopening in October 2016. By that year, more than two million people visited the Uffizi, making it the most visited art gallery in Italy. At peak periods, particularly in July, wait times for entry ran as long as five hours. A revised ticketing system introduced in 2018 cut those waits to just minutes.

• 5. Pandemic, Protest, and New Voices

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  The COVID-19 pandemic closed the Uffizi for 150 days in 2020. Attendance fell by 72 percent that year, dropping to 659,043 visitors. Despite that collapse, the museum ranked 27th on the global list of most-visited art museums for 2020. The Uffizi responded by making works from its collection available for remote viewing through Google Arts and Culture. When it reopened in May 2021 following a renovation, the museum added 14 new rooms and put 129 additional artworks on display, with a stated aim of giving more representation to historically under-represented groups, including women and people of color. Climate activists introduced a different kind of disruption. On the 22nd of July 2022, members of the group Ultima Generazione, meaning Last Generation, glued themselves to the glass protecting Sandro Botticelli's Primavera, demanding an end to fossil fuel use. The painting was undamaged. On the 13th of February 2024, other members of the same group glued images of flooding in Tuscany in 2023 to the glass protecting Botticelli's Birth of Venus, protesting Italian government inaction on climate change. The painting was undamaged and the images were removed.

• 6. The 1993 Bombing

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  On the 27th of May 1993, a car bomb planted by the Sicilian Mafia exploded in Via dei Georgofili, the street running alongside the Uffizi. Five people were killed. The blast damaged parts of the palace, destroyed five pieces of art outright, and damaged 30 more. Several paintings had been protected by bulletproof glass and escaped harm. The worst structural damage fell on the Niobe room, along with its classical sculptures and neoclassical interior. The room has since been restored, though the frescoes it contained were damaged beyond repair. The attack placed the Uffizi at the center of a broader Mafia campaign against Italian cultural institutions and the state, a campaign that also targeted sites in Rome and Milan that same night. The collection of ancient sculptures that survived includes works such as the Arrotino, the Two Wrestlers, and the Venus de' Medici, pieces that anchor the museum's holdings outside the Renaissance paintings that tend to draw the largest crowds.