The Gallerie degli Uffizi (Uffizi Galleries) in Florence have announced a sweeping €50m revamp of their museums and gardens, describing the size and breadth of the measure as “without precedent”.
Updates such as the installation of new lighting systems, the creation of new exhibition space, the redesign of museum displays and accessibility improvements will be carried out across the complex, including at the Uffizi Gallery, the Palazzo Pitti across the Arno and the Boboli Gardens, an 11-acre space outside the Pitti designed in the 16th century for Florence’s Medici rulers.
Labels and signs will be updated at the Uffizi and Palazzo Pitti, while new equipment including air-handling systems—which help to regulate the indoor climate—will be installed to improve the conservation of works. The changes will “radically transform the face” of Italy’s most visited art museum, its management promises. The entire programme is expected to be completed within two years.
“Thanks to this series of unprecedented interventions, of extraordinary scope and depth, the Uffizi will present an even better image to the world than it does today,” Simone Verde, director of the Uffizi Galleries, said in a statement.
Half of the overall budget is covered by ticket sales while the other half will come from culture ministry funds earmarked for major redevelopments, a spokesperson for Verde tells The Art Newspaper. The various projects were initiated or planned immediately after Verde’s administration took office in 2024, though some had been identified as necessary long before, the spokesman added.
Some of the announced projects have already been completed, such as the restoration of the rooms of the Flemish Masters, three frescoed spaces in the Uffizi Gallery which reopened in July 2024 following a restoration.
“They have been announced only now, out of a sense of seriousness, to avoid triumphalist communications before concrete results had been achieved,” the spokesperson said of the decision to include completed projects in the announcement.
Planned or ongoing work at the Uffizi as part of the revamp includes the creation of a new introductory exhibition space dedicated to the history of the collection, which will cost €2.4m. At the Palazzo Pitti, the “Piano degli Occhi”, a 1,000 sq. m. space on the last floor of the palace, which is currently largely unknown, will be turned into a new exhibition area for €4.9m. Lighting will be overhauled in various exhibition rooms at the Palatine Gallery, the former imperial and royal apartments that occupy the whole of the first floor of the Pitti.
A rendering of a planned new reception area at the Uffizi Gallery
Courtesy of Gallerie degli Uffizi
In the Boboli Gardens, the so-called “amphitheatre”, a horse-shoe shaped green space realised in the 17th-century on the site of a quarry from which rock was sourced to build the Pitti Palace, will be restored for €3m. The Fountain of Neptune, surrounded by an artificial lake, will also be restored.
The Uffizi Galleries has unveiled major overhauls before. In 2022, it announced a separate €50m masterplan to revamp the Boboli Gardens over eight years, in an effort to mitigate the effects of climate change while making the gardens more energy efficient, accessible and attractive.
