Galerie des Offices

The word uffizi just means offices. Cosimo I de' Medici, who had made himself the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, wanted the city's magistracies and guilds gathered in one place, and in 1560 he had Giorgio Vasari design this long U-shaped block running down to the river Arno. The top floor, lit by its endless windows, was later glazed and hung with the family's art, and the offices quietly became a gallery.

Everything in it belongs to Florence because of one woman. Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, the last of the line, signed a pact in 1737 leaving the entire Medici collection to the Tuscan state on a single condition, that nothing ever leave the city. Without that clause the Botticellis and Raphaels would have been scattered across the auction houses of Europe.

Instead they are still here. Sandro Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus', the goddess arriving on a shell, and the 'Primavera', with its orange grove and dancing figures, hang in the same set of rooms. A raised walkway called the Vasari Corridor still links the gallery across the river to the Pitti Palace, built so the Medici could pass between home and office without touching the street. In 1993 a Mafia car bomb exploded just outside, killing five people and damaging dozens of works, and the gallery has kept one scarred painting on view as a record of that night.