Palazzo Pitti, the sumptuous rooms of the Royal Apartments are accessible to the public again from 21 January, after a five-year closure. 14 rooms on the first floor of the Palace where, for three hundred years, the lords of three different ruling dynasties lived: Medici, Lorraine and Savoy. Among the first residents of this wing of the Palace, in the second half of the seventeenth century, was Grand Prince Ferdinando de' Medici, son of Grand Duke Cosimo III; the last, Vittorio Emanuele III of Savoy, left it to the State, together with the Boboli Gardens, in 1919. 

Not open to visitors from 2020, the Royal Apartments have recently undergone a complex general restoration and conservation operation which was carried out by a large multidisciplinary team of specialists and which involved the most varied interventions in all the rooms.

A meticulous work that covered from the vaults to the floors, where, in particular, rugs and carpets were removed, leaving the perfectly preserved parquet floors exposed. An in-depth campaign of cleaning, maintenance and recovery interventions was also carried out on frescoes, stucco, carvings, silk wallpapers, curtains, paintings, furniture and ornaments. The decorative style of the Apartments is "mixed" and reflects the eras and tastes of the personalities and dynasties that have inhabited them over the centuries.

 

The Royal Apartments of Palazzo Pitti can be visited from Tuesday to Sunday (they are included in the Palazzo Pitti ticket or in the Firenzecard). The public opening hours will be from 10.00 to 17.00 (time of the last visit), with free accompanied visits every hour, without reservation or ticketing, for a total of 8 accompanied visits per day. The visits will have a maximum number of visitors of 20 people, applying the order of arrival criterion in the formation of the group (a registration sheet will be made available for you to sign up on).

Guard room of the apartment of Grand Prince Ferdinando de' Medici (1663-1713), from the period of which only the Allegory of peace between Florence and Fiesole, painted by Luca Giordano, remains in the center of the vault. The decoration by Giuseppe Castagnoli dates back to the time of the Habsburg-Lorraine (1737-1799 and 1814-1859), and, with the reign of the Savoy, starting from 1860, the eighteenth-century portraits of French origin were added.