The story
One room of this palace on the Arno shows a crimson velvet gown from the 1500s, cut in the Spanish fashion and very probably made by the court tailor for Eleonora of Toledo, the Spanish-born wife of Cosimo I de' Medici. Nearby, Bronzino, the Medici court painter, portrays Eleonora herself beside her young son Francesco.
The palace was begun in 1583 for that same son, by then Grand Duke Francesco I, to designs by the architect Bernardo Buontalenti. It absorbed older buildings, among them the medieval Verga d'Oro tower, from which Galileo Galilei, Pisa's most famous scientist, is said to have shown the court his astronomical discoveries. After the Medici, the palace served the Lorraine grand dukes and then the Savoy kings whenever they stayed in Pisa.
The national museum opened in its halls in 1989, with tapestries, portraits and furnishings from all three dynasties. It also keeps a large collection of old armour from the Gioco del Ponte, the mock battle that Pisan teams still fight every June on the city's central bridge.
