Palazzo Vecchio

In 1299 the commune and people of Florence resolved to build a palace worthy of the city and more secure for its magistrates in turbulent times. Arnolfo di Cambio, architect of the Duomo and of Santa Croce, raised it on the ruins of the Palazzo dei Fanti and the Palazzo dell'Esecutore di Giustizia, once held by the Uberti, the Ghibelline family driven out of Florence in 1266. Giovanni Villani (1276-1348) wrote in his Nuova Cronica that the Uberti were "rebels of Florence and Ghibellines", and that the palace was built to ensure their houses could never rise on that ground again.

Arnolfo took in the older Foraboschi tower, then known as La Vacca, as the substructure of the new tower, which is why the 94-metre Torre d'Arnolfo does not sit centred on the facade. He died in 1302 and two other masters finished the work, the first phase closing in 1314 or 1315. From 26 March 1302 it housed the Signoria, the city council headed by the Priors, and the Gonfaloniere of Justice.

Walter VI of Brienne, Duke of Athens, began the first alterations in 1342-43, extending the palace towards via della Ninna and giving it the aspect of a fortress. Between 1440 and 1460, under Cosimo de' Medici, Renaissance decoration entered the Sala dei Dugento, and Michelozzo designed the first courtyard in 1453. A small cell in the tower, the Alberghetto, held Cosimo the Elder before his sentence of exile, and later Girolamo Savonarola.

In 1494 Simone del Pollaiolo built the Salone dei Cinquecento on Savonarola's commission; having replaced the exiled Medici as spiritual leader of the Republic, he wanted a seat for a Grand Council of five hundred members. Savonarola said his last prayers in the palace's Chapel of the Signoria before he was hanged in the Piazza della Signoria and his body burned there on 23 May 1498.

Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned in 1503 to paint one long wall of the Salone with a battle scene celebrating a Florentine victory. He mixed wax into his pigments, and when it was not drying fast enough brought in braziers of hot coals. Michelangelo, given the opposite wall, never went beyond preparatory drawings: Pope Julius II called him to Rome to paint the Sistine Chapel, and his sketches were destroyed by young artists who studied them and carried off scraps.

Both pieces, Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari and Michelangelo's Battle of Cascina, were lost when Giorgio Vasari enlarged the hall so that Cosimo I could hold court in it. A legend holds that Vasari had a false wall built over the Anghiari to preserve it; attempts to find the work behind his fresco have so far been inconclusive. The decorations that survive in the hall were made between 1555 and 1572 by Vasari and his helpers, among them Livio Agresti of Forli.

Duke Cosimo I de' Medici moved his official seat from the Medici palazzo in via Larga to the Palazzo della Signoria in May 1540, and from that year the rooms became living quarters for his wife Eleonora of Toledo, her private chapel frescoed by Bronzino. Work on the Guardaroba, a map room, began in 1563; Egnazio Danti was entrusted with the map murals, of which fifty-seven were planned for its cabinet doors and fifty-three remain.

Cosimo commissioned Vasari to build an above-ground walkway from the palace, through the Uffizi and over the Ponte Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti, and moved the seat of government to the Uffizi. When he took the Palazzo Pitti as his residence in 1565 the older building was renamed the Palazzo Vecchio, though the square kept the name Piazza della Signoria. The court crossed the Arno officially in 1588, under Grand Duke Ferdinando.

From 1865 to 1871, with Florence the temporary capital of the Kingdom of Italy, the palace held the new state's Chamber of Deputies. Since 1872 it has housed the office of the mayor of Florence, and it is the seat of the City Council; the first-floor rooms the mayor uses are not open to the public. Giulio Cirri restored several quarters between 1950 and 1960, among them the Salone dei Cinquecento and the Studiolo of Francesco I.

Excavations begun in the early 2000s reached the Roman theatre of Florentia beneath the building, and three of the underground rooms have been open to visitors since December 2008. Most of the palace is a museum, protected as Italian national heritage, and in 2019 it joined six museums in Germany, the United Kingdom, Greece and Switzerland in the Multaka network, which runs free guided tours for refugees and migrants led by Arabic-speaking guides.