Galleria Palatina

The Galleria Palatina is inside the Palazzo Pitti, the vast Florentine palace across the river that the Medici grand-dukes made their main residence. What strikes you first is how the pictures hang. They are stacked frame to frame up the walls, the way the grand-dukes displayed them as princely decoration, in gilded rooms named after planets with ceilings frescoed by Pietro da Cortona.

The collection is heavy with the artists the Medici loved, above all Raphael. Several of his portraits and Madonnas are here, among them the round Madonna della Seggiola and the Woman with a Veil, thought to show the same dark-eyed model. Titian hangs here in force too, alongside Rubens and Caravaggio's Sleeping Cupid.

It is walked as a suite of state rooms, the crowded princely hang left much as the Medici's heirs kept it.