The Uffizi Galleries occupy a long, monumental building between Florence’s Piazza della Signoria and the Arno. Its name comes from the Italian word for offices: Cosimo I de’ Medici commissioned Giorgio Vasari in 1560 to bring the city’s magistracies and administrative services together. The project altered an existing neighbourhood and created a carefully framed urban space beside the river. What visitors enter today began not as a purpose-built public museum, but as a centre of government and ducal power.
Vasari died in 1574 before the complex was finished; Alfonso Parigi and Bernardo Buontalenti completed it in 1580. The Medici gradually installed works and antiquities in the upper-floor galleries. Francesco I’s collection and the octagonal Tribuna helped shape the building’s early museum role, while the long corridors displayed paintings, portraits and ancient sculpture. The collection expanded over generations, and the gallery became known to travellers and scholars well before it opened to the general public.
