The Royal Apartments
Appartamenti Reali
The fourteen magnificent rooms that open out along the south side of the Palazzo Pitti façade are today known as the Royal Apartments.
From the 17th century on, these majestic rooms were the residence of the Grand Ducal Medici family, then of the Lorenese and finally, of the Savoys, when Florence became the second capital of unified Italy and Vittoria Emanuele II chose to make the Pitti the royal residence.
There remain but few traces of the oldest Medici period and those that do remain are connected most of all with Grand Prince Ferdinando, the son of Cosimo III, who assembled in these rooms his impressive collection of Renaissance and baroque masterpieces from the Venetian, Florentine, and Emilian schools, a collection which is still the core of the Palatine Gallery and Uffizi collections.
The prevailing appearance of the Royal Apartments as we see them today is that given them by the neo-classical taste of the Lorraine-Hapsburgs in the fourth and fifth decades of the 19th century, an appearance given its final character by the strongly eclectic stamp of the Savoys. The work commissioned by the Savoys and carried out between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, described in the 1911 Inventory of Pitti Palace paintings and furniture, was chosen as the basis for the recent re-furbishing of the Apartments, completed between 1987 and 1993. The major exhibition of Italian 16th century painting, organized in these rooms shortly after the First World War, in 1922, as well as the exhibition of French tapestries from the Crocetta Palace, had resulted in a significant alteration in the placement of the furniture, changing an arrangement that had gradually evolved over centuries. In addition, following a general reorganization of the Florentine galleries, a series of important paintings had been transferred from the Apartments to the Palatine Gallery or to the Uffizi, and the larger Lorraine and Savoy mirrors, the furniture, furnishings and everything else that had created a homogeneous, decorative and historical whole had been moved to villas or simply placed in storage.
Navarro, Fausta, "Royal Apartments", Pitti Palace: the art and the works, Sillabe 2001, Livorno, p. 63.
From the 17th century on, these majestic rooms were the residence of the Grand Ducal Medici family, then of the Lorenese and finally, of the Savoys, when Florence became the second capital of unified Italy and Vittoria Emanuele II chose to make the Pitti the royal residence.
There remain but few traces of the oldest Medici period and those that do remain are connected most of all with Grand Prince Ferdinando, the son of Cosimo III, who assembled in these rooms his impressive collection of Renaissance and baroque masterpieces from the Venetian, Florentine, and Emilian schools, a collection which is still the core of the Palatine Gallery and Uffizi collections.
The prevailing appearance of the Royal Apartments as we see them today is that given them by the neo-classical taste of the Lorraine-Hapsburgs in the fourth and fifth decades of the 19th century, an appearance given its final character by the strongly eclectic stamp of the Savoys. The work commissioned by the Savoys and carried out between the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries, described in the 1911 Inventory of Pitti Palace paintings and furniture, was chosen as the basis for the recent re-furbishing of the Apartments, completed between 1987 and 1993. The major exhibition of Italian 16th century painting, organized in these rooms shortly after the First World War, in 1922, as well as the exhibition of French tapestries from the Crocetta Palace, had resulted in a significant alteration in the placement of the furniture, changing an arrangement that had gradually evolved over centuries. In addition, following a general reorganization of the Florentine galleries, a series of important paintings had been transferred from the Apartments to the Palatine Gallery or to the Uffizi, and the larger Lorraine and Savoy mirrors, the furniture, furnishings and everything else that had created a homogeneous, decorative and historical whole had been moved to villas or simply placed in storage.
Navarro, Fausta, "Royal Apartments", Pitti Palace: the art and the works, Sillabe 2001, Livorno, p. 63.
Piano Nobile
I. The Green Room
II. The Throne Room III. The Blue Room IV. The Chapel V. The Parrot Room VI. The Queen's Sitting Room |
VII. The Queen's Bedroom
VIII. The Oval Room IX. The Round Room X. The King's Bedroom XI. The King's Study XII. The King's Red Room |