Uffizi Gallery
— — the offices Florence kept for its paintings.
Not only on a wall.
“The building Cosimo I de' Medici commissioned in 1560 as government offices. Vasari ran a long corridor along the river side and the family installed its pictures in the upper rooms. Almost two centuries later, the last Medici bequeathed the whole collection to Florence on the condition that it never leave the city. It hasn't. Botticelli is still upstairs. The line in the courtyard moves slowly past the statues of Dante and Galileo, who once lived a few streets away.
Uffizi Gallery, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Uffizi sits on the south flank of Piazza della Signoria in Florence, the U-shaped building closing the square's open end and running south to the Arno. Cosimo I de' Medici commissioned it in 1560 from Giorgio Vasari to house the offices of the Florentine magistrates. The word *uffizi* is archaic Italian for offices. The two long wings cup a narrow courtyard lined with nineteenth-century statues of Tuscan worthies: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Galileo, Leonardo, Michelangelo. The river end opens onto the Lungarno degli Archibusieri. The Vasari Corridor, built in 1565, runs from the upper floor across the Ponte Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti on the south bank.
Vasari designed the building as a single long ground-floor loggia with two upper storeys and a row of mezzanine windows, giving Florence its first sustained piece of late-Mannerist civic architecture. He died in 1574 before the work was done; Bernardo Buontalenti finished it in 1581 and added the octagonal Tribuna on the upper floor, its dome lined with mother-of-pearl shells to hold the most prized of the Medici antiquities. The exterior is the pale grey *pietra serena* sandstone quarried from the hills above Fiesole, the same stone Brunelleschi had used a century earlier at the Pazzi Chapel. The paired Doric columns and unbroken cornice are Vasari's address to Roman civic architecture, translated for a Medici grand duke.
The gallery opens Tuesday through Sunday from 8:15 in the morning, closing at 6:30, with last entry forty-five minutes before. It is closed Mondays, on Christmas Day, and on the first of May. Standard high-season admission is around 25 euros, less in the off-months, with EU citizens under eighteen admitted free and the first Sunday of certain months open at no charge. Advance booking through the official site is effectively required from April through October; same-day queues in summer routinely run two to three hours. The collection is laid out in roughly chronological order along the upper corridor, beginning with Giotto and Cimabue and ending with Caravaggio. Plan two and a half hours minimum; a full visit takes a day.