The rival's palace

Luca Pitti wanted a house that would outdo everything else in Florence, and he chose the slope on this side of the river for it. Stand on the sloping square and you feel what he was after: anyone arriving here looks up at a facade almost two hundred metres wide, cut from the hill behind it.

Pitti was a banker and a political opponent of Cosimo the Elder, and he started building around 1458. Things turned out differently, because his faction lost, his fortune evaporated and the building was left half finished, until Eleonora di Toledo bought it from an impoverished heir with her own money in 1550.

And so the circle closes. The Medici began in a house that was meant above all to stay unnoticed, and they ended up in the palace of the man who had set out to beat them, at a distance from the streets that had made them great.

To the right of the facade lies the gate to the garden that climbs up against the hill.