An encounter with the great art of the West: wonders to be discovered that never cease to amaze.

The Gallery occupies the entire first and second floors of the large building designed by Giorgio Vasari between 1560 and 1580. It is one of the most famous museums in the world, home to extraordinary collections of ancient sculptures and paintings that trace the evolution of art from the Middle Ages to the modern age.

The collections of paintings from the 14th century and the Renaissance include some of the most admired masterpieces of all time, by masters such as Giotto, Simone Martini, Piero della Francesca, Beato Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, Mantegna, Correggio, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Caravaggio.
Alongside these, the Gallery also houses important works of European painting, particularly German, Dutch and Flemish.

The exhibition is completed by the splendid collections of ancient statuary and busts that belonged to the Medici family: Roman sculptures, often copies of lost Greek originals, which embellish the corridors of the Gallery and bear witness to the collecting taste and passion for antiquity of its founders.

WHERE

Piazzale degli Uffizi 6 - 50122 Firenze

A major show is coming to the Uffizi, exhibiting wax art produced between the 16th and 17th centuries.

December will see the first exhibition of this particu-lar genre, organized by the Gallery in new spaces

The more than 90 works include paintings, sculptures, cameos, and gemstones; the many significant loans will feature works returning to Florence after centuries.

The exhibit will include a very rare gaetano zumbo work just purchased by the museum: the "Corruption of the bodies".

Cera una volta. I Medici e l'arte della ceroplastica (“Wax Upon a Time. The Medici and the art of ceroplastics”): this is the title of the exhibition to be held from 18 December 2025 to 12 April 2026 in the new exhibition spaces on the ground floor of the Uffizi Galleries.

Curated by Valentina Conticelli and Andrea Daninos, the show is the first to be dedicated to the Florentine collections of wax sculptural pieces produced between the 16th and 17th centuries.

Starting from its title (a pun that plays on the homophony between the Italian cera, or “wax,” and c’era, the first element of c’era una volta or “Once upon a time”, the iconic phrase that starts every fable), the exhibition aims to bring back to life a lost creative setting with an ancient history: the production of images in wax – images that have to a large degree disappeared due to the perishability of the material. Evidence of this tradition comes down to us from the 1st century AD in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis Historia. The Roman author reported ancestral customs, most likely arising from the Etruscan use of death masks that later became facial portraits functioning as simulacra for ancestor worship.

The art of wax would always remain alive in popular sensitivities (down to the votive offerings burned to this day in sacred flames at Christian shrines) and would enjoy particularly renewed fortune among the fine arts in Medicean Florence between the 15th and the late 17th centuries.

Soft and neutral in the skilled hands of Renaissance and Baroque artists able to achieve polychromy while shaping lifelike sculptures and reliefs, wax was able to give substance to faces and bodies in the form of enduring images.

In a Baroque culture obsessed with the passage of time, this organic material, created by bees and malleable by its very nature, mimicked the characteristics of the skin like nothing else could, and was enhanced by giving shape to the living body, and to its dissolution.

The exhibition Cera una volta aims to acquaint the public with this art – now almost unknown – in the time of its greatest splendour. Attaining the highest forms of virtuosity, it was eagerly sought out not only for shrines, but for princely collections as well.

In the setting of a history once forgotten and now rediscovered in its surprising wonder, the exhibit will include certain works that were displayed at the Tribuna of the Uffizi and at the Pitti Palace in the past, and were then removed from the collections in the late 18th century: centuries later, they will be back in the museum for the first time.

Overall, about 90 works are on display, with a host of loans from other museums – on top of the vast selection of wax pieces, paintings, sculptures, cameos, and works in gemstones. Visitors will have the opportunity to admire Anima urlante all’Inferno (“Howling soul in Hell”) attributed to Giulio de’ Grazia, and the famed plaster funerary mask of Lorenzo the Magnificent, done by the sculptor Orsino Benintendi.

An entire room will be devoted to the greatest wax sculptor active in Florence in the late 17th century: Gaetano Giulio Zumbo.

A recent acquisition by the Galleries is in fact the work of Zumbo. The piece is titled The Corruption of the Bodies – a theme typical of this rarest of artists. With this small piece by the great wax sculptor, the memory of his most famed works will remain alive at the Uffizi Galleries.

According to Simone Verde, Director of the Uffizi Galleries: “A true cultural and academic event, this exhibition will allow visitors to rediscover an entire area of artistic creation – one unknown to the general public and nearly wholly forgotten outside of the restricted circle of specialists. And this is a genuine paradox for a creative universe that has actually always straddled the divide between popular taste and academic erudition, between religious mysticism and artistic invention. In this show – one that we decided to make nocturnal, as if to evoke the subterranean underworld where disappeared souls and visions dwell –, the Uffizi Gallaries are therefore offering their visiting public a journey through time, culture, and the most intimate sensibility of late-Baroque Florence and Europe”.

WHERE

Uffizi, Exhibition Rooms of the West Wing - Piazzale degli Uffizi 6 - 50122 Firenze

The walkway connecting the Uffizi Gallery to Palazzo Pitti is an exciting route that allows visitors to discover the city from surprising and unexpected viewpoints.

Created by Giorgio Vasari for Cosimo I de' Medici, the corridor runs for about a kilometre above the city and the river, entering palaces, encircling the Torre de' Mannelli, overlooking the Church of Santa Felicita and ending at Pitti and Boboli. Kings used it to reach Palazzo Vecchio undisturbed and without risk to their safety.

The new layout of the Vasari Corridor allows everyone to walk along this amazing walkway overlooking the heart of Florence.

WHERE

Piazzale degli Uffizi 6 - 50122 Firenze

Between public and private court life: a Palace for three dynasties.

Purchased in 1550, the Palace was chosen by Cosimo I de’ Medici and his wife Eleanor of Toledo as the new Grand Ducal residence, and it soon became the new symbol of the Medici’s power over Tuscany. It also housed the Court of other two dynasties: the House of Habsburg-Lorraine (which succeeded the Medici from 1737) and the Kings of Italy from the House of Savoy, who inhabited it from 1865. Nonetheless the palace still bears the name of its first owner, the Florentine banker Luca Pitti that in the mid-1400s started its construction – maybe after a design by Brunelleschi – at the foot of the Boboli hill beyond the Arno River.

Today the Palace is divided into five museums: the Treasury of the Grand Dukes and the Museum of Russian Icons (with the Palatine Chapel) on the ground floor, the Palatine Gallery and the Imperial and Royal Apartments on the first floor, the Gallery of Modern Art and the Museum of Costume and Fashion on the second floor.

WHERE

Piazza de' Pitti 1 - 50125 Firenze

Where Nature, Art, Science and Alchemy meet.

Directly behind Pitti Palace are the marvellous Boboli Gardens. The Medici family established the layout of the gardens, creating the Italian garden style that would become a model for many European courts.

The vast green expanse with a regular layout is a real outdoor museum, populated by ancient and Renaissance statues. The Gardens are also adorned with grottos, the most important of which is the famous grotto realized by Bernardo Buontalenti, as well as large fountains, such as the Fountain of Neptune and the Fountain of the Ocean. The subsequent Habsburg-Lorraine and Savoy dynasties further developed the layout, extending the boundaries that flank the ancient city walls until Porta Romana. In the stunningly beautiful terraced area there is an 18th-century pavilion called the Kaffeehaus, a rare example of Rococo architecture in Tuscany, and the Lemon House built by Zanobi del Rosso between 1777 and 1778. The tour of Boboli Gardens complete the Pitti Palace visit of which it is an integral part, allowing the spirit of court life to be fully appreciated and the gardens to be enjoyed, which, although constantly updated, remain true to their original project.

WHERE

Piazza de' Pitti 1 - 50125 Firenze