The fingerprints of the architect Vasari are all over the city of Florence. Along with the famous corridor above Ponte Vecchio, Vasari also designed the city"s most impressive museum, the Uffizi gallery, or Galleria degli Uffizi. Constructed at the behest of Cosimo I de" Medici in the 16th century to house the offices for Florentine magistrates, the museum is now home to the largest collection of Italian and Florentine Renaissance art in the world. Though far from the largest museum, tickets to Uffizi gallery have been said to allow entrance into a gallery that has more art per square inch than any other museum.

Florence witnessed the genesis of the Italian Renaissance, and many of the movement"s highlights reside in the Uffizi Gallery, including Botticelli"s The Birth of Venus, Leonardo da Vinci"s Adoration of the Magi, Lippi"s Coronation of the Virgin, Caravaggio"s The Sacrifice of Isaac and other great works by masters such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian and Giotto. When Anna Maria Ludovica -the last in the line of Medicis - died, the people of Florence inherited the entire collection of her family"s art. Statues of the most acclaimed artists, sculptors and philosophers of all time line the outside of the Galleria degli Uffizi and are a wonder to behold all by themselves. But that shouldn"t dissuade you from entering, as the majesty of Florentine art spikes exponentially inside.

The interior is a series of rooms, grouped into influential schools or artistic periods to show the advancement of Florentine and general European art though the ages. It begins with the post-Byzantine work of Giotto and ends with contributions from the likes of Rubens and Tintoretto. Tickets to Uffizi gallery also offer a new feature: high windows on the upper floor of the gallery display the skyline of Florence at its finest, the Duomo domineering the azure breezes of one of Italy"s ideal landscapes.

Florence Map