The Uffizi Gallery Guided Tour

OUR UFFIZI GALLERY PRIVATE GUIDED TOUR IS A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE YOU WON'T FORGET!

The Uffizi Gallery of Florence houses the most important collection of Renaissance paintings in the world. The palace was built under the commission of Duke Cosimo I in 1560 as the administrative center of the state housing the city Magistrates. The spectacular architecture was designed and built by Giorgio Vasari, the Duke's favorite painter and architect. The Uffizi is Vasari's architectural masterpiece, an aerial building in a “u” shaped plan, made of "pietra serena" (a type of local sandstone. In 1565, when the building was almost finished and Cosimo had moved the residence of his family to Pitti Palace, Vasari was asked to build a private walkway connecting the Uffizi to Pitti Palace, which came to be known as the Vasari Corridor. The corridor was a useful and secure way to move without guards from the Government Palace to the new residence (an astonishing view of the Corridor will be available from the windows of the Gallery).

Our Uffizi Gallery Guided Tour focuses on the most important Renaissance masters such as Giotto, considered to be the painter who paved the way for the Renaissance; Filippo Lippi, a friar turned painter who was much admired by Cosimo the Elder; Piero della Francesca, the sublime painter of light! You will also admire Botticelli’s two most famous paintings: The Birth of Venus and The Spring, both of them painted for the Medici family, with their intriguing symbolism; Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation, painted when the master was only 20 years old, but already showing his color shading technique called "sfumato"; the marvelous Tondo Doni by Michelangelo, which is considered the world's only certain panel painting by the great master (still in its original frame!); some of the most famous works by Raphael and the Venetian painter Titian, the official painter of Emperor Charles V.

The aim of our Uffizi Gallery Guided Tour is not to rush through the Gallery, but instead, to observe selected works in depth and using the Gallery as a visual text, you will be told the history and evolution of Florentine art.