You're standing at the mouth of a long, narrow courtyard that runs down toward the river, framed by two matching wings and lined with statues of famous Florentines. This is the Uffizi — one of the greatest art museums on earth. Botticelli's Birth of Venus is in here. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, room after room of the most famous paintings ever made. And the name, Uffizi, isn't grand or Latin or mysterious. It just means the offices.
Because that is exactly what this was. Cosimo the First, the first Medici Grand Duke, wanted all the scattered departments of the Florentine government under one roof — the magistrates, the tax collectors, the guild bureaus, the notaries. So he had Vasari, his court architect, design one enormous, elegant office block to hold the paperwork of the state. It is, to this day, the most beautiful bureaucracy building ever constructed.
Then the family started hanging their private art collection along the top floor, so they could wander through
it in peace. Visitors began asking to see it. And slowly the office building with a gallery on top turned into a gallery with a few offices in it — until they opened it to the public, decades before the Louvre in Paris opened its doors. Only in Florence is the old government tax office one of the first and greatest public museums in the world.
And once that top floor was a gallery, the Medici pa
