The mighty Pitti Palace is located in one of the most sought-after and popular areas for tourists, the Oltrarno, with its stately palaces, ancient streets, shops and the
premises that attracted the Florentines and not only Commissioned by Luca Pitti, who with the large size of his residence wanted to compete with the Medici and Strozzi on the other side of the Arno River. But it was the Medici family who bought it to leave Palazzo Vecchio. It was the wife of Cosimo I, Eleonora di Toledo who bought it. He had been suffering from tuberculosis for years and wanted to live in the healthiest part of the city where he could finally have a real huge garden to cultivate his plants that until then he had taken care of in the terraces between the austere walls of Palazzo Vecchio.
The palace was enlarged and the marvellous Boboli Garden was created, a model for many European courts, with labyrinths, statues, fountains and paths to walk. Greenhouses were created to grow all kinds of plants, including the much-loved citrus fruits. It still houses one of the most important collections of citrus fruits in Europe, with almost 500 plants. Inside the palace there are some of the most interesting museums in Florence. On the first floor are the Royal Apartments and the splendid Palatine Gallery, with its richly decorated rooms and famous works by artists such as Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio and Lippi. On the upper floor you enter the Gallery of Modern Art while on the ground floor, in the part of the palace used in summer by the Medici family, in the rooms richly frescoed in the seventeenth century on the occasion of the marriage between Ferdinando II de'Medici and Vittoria della Rovere is preserved the "Treasure of the Medici".
