The building, which is one of the emblematic texts of Mannerist architecture, was begun in 1560 by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) on commission from Cosimo de’ Medici, the Duke of Florence, to house the offices of the Magistrates and Guilds that governed the city.


Bernardo Buontalenti (1536-1608) also worked on the building. In the 1580s he built the large Medici theatre (no longer in existence) on the piano nobile of the eastern wing, the “Tribuna” on the top floor in the “Gallery of statues” and the pre-Baroque Porta delle suppliche on Via Lambertesca.


The appearance of the building is characterised by the distinctive U-shaped plan that dictates its integration in the urban layout and its scenographic relation with the old city centre, the river and the surrounding hills.


The architectural order of the facades is the Tuscan Doric, with members in dark grey sandstone (pietra serena) and white plaster.

In the interior, on the ground floor the halls of the government offices overlook the arcade, and on the first floor (piano nobile) the rooms previously occupied by the State Archive run along both sides above the arcade. On the top floor are the three corridors, with ceilings frescoed with grotesques from 1580 on, which is also where the antique statues are housed.





Leading off the eastern and western corridors are the rooms of the art gallery. Among these, on the east corridor, beyond the eighteenth-century Lorraine vestibule, is a series of rooms designed in the 1950s by the architects Michelucci, Scarpa and Gardella, in line with the canons of modern architecture. Further on, beyond the rooms devoted to Lippi and Leonardo, renovated in the 1990s, are the “Tribuna”, with the only sixteenth-century areas that have survived, the so-called rooms of the “armature” and the cabinet of the “gemme” which dates to the eighteenth century. After the exceptionally beautiful views of Florence that can be seen from the south corridor, other rooms then open off the west corridor, including the “Niobe” room designed in the Neoclassical period to display the group of antique statues of the same name.


The Uffizi building is the most famous monumental section of an architectural compendium dating from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth-century, which comprises the houses of the Arte dei Vaiai (Furriers’ Guild) in Via Lambertesca and a building pre-dating the Uffizi on Lungarno Archibusieri (14th-15th century), the Magliabechiana library in Piazza del Grano (18th century) and the Palazzo dei Véliti in Piazza dei Giudici (19th century).