Enhance your holiday travel experience by downloading this audio tour of the Pitti Palace in Florence, Italy.
Great Discoveries self guided audio tour of the Pitti Palace provides today's tourist with the most enjoyable and informative way to visit Italy's most majestic palace. Lavishly decorated and fully furnished, it remains one of the most extraordinary residences in the world, undoubtedly the grandest of all Renaissance palaces. Today its countless rambling rooms house several museums, the most important of which is the Palatine Gallery, whose beautiful salons are filled from floor to ceiling with paintings from the Medici private collection. It is one of the largest and most important museums in the world containing works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Lippi, Tintoretto, Peter Paul Rubins, and others. Cardinal Leopoldo de Medici provided mostly Venetian paintings while the Grand Prince Ferdinand de Medici contributed his exceptional Renaissance and Baroque Collection.
The Pitti Palace may not bear the Medici name, but members of Florence's first family were the owners of this monolithic building for many centuries. Brunelleschi designed and built the original palace in 1458 for the rich and powerful Luca Pitti, a business rival to Cosimo (the Elder) di Medici. Luca Pitti never completed the palace because his own banking speculations and the cost of such a grandiose building financially ruined him. In 1549 Luca's grandson Bonaccorso was ironically forced to sell Luca's glorious palace to Eleanora, the Duchess of Toledo, the rich and beautiful wife of Cosimo I di Medici.
The palace remained the seat of the Medici court and the family's successors, the Austrian Grand Dukes of Lorraine, for some three centuries, until 1859 when the Grand Duchy of Florence was annexed to the unified Kingdom of Italy. The palace and its courtyard were the focus for dazzling public royal events and celebrations, including the weddings, baptisms and funerals of the Medici, Hapsburg-Lorraine's and the King's of Italy. Despite the fact that the Pitti Palace has hosted all of the ruling families of Florence, Tuscany and Italy from the 16th century on; the Medici's, the Lorraine's, the Bourbon's, the Bonaparte's and the Savoy's, Florentines, conservative by nature, have always refused to call it a royal palace.
Our carefully researched tour guides you through the majestic Palatine Galleries and the Royal Apartments as a professional narrator accompanied by historically appropriate background music points out and describes the most significant works of art done by some of the most hallowed names in Italian and European art. Shatter your idea of history, throw down your guidebook and venture off to see and hear the stories behind this magnificent, some might say ostentatious, Renaissance palace.
Guides are recorded in easy to follow segments that are readily located your iPod. This 3 hour and 50 minute 42 track, audio tour is designed to work with an easy to read building diagram, with clearly numbered locations, which coordinate with the track numbers and descriptions displayed on your iPod.
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Enhance your holiday travel experience by downloading this audio tour of the Pitti Palace in Florence, Italy.
Great Discoveries self guided audio tour of the Pitti Palace provides today's tourist with the most enjoyable and informative way to visit Italy's most majestic palace. Lavishly decorated and fully furnished, it remains one of the most extraordinary residences in the world, undoubtedly the grandest of all Renaissance palaces. Today its countless rambling rooms house several museums, the most important of which is the Palatine Gallery, whose beautiful salons are filled from floor to ceiling with paintings from the Medici private collection. It is one of the largest and most important museums in the world containing works of Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Lippi, Tintoretto, Peter Paul Rubins, and others. Cardinal Leopoldo de Medici provided mostly Venetian paintings while the Grand Prince Ferdinand de Medici contributed his exceptional Renaissance and Baroque Collection.
The Pitti Palace may not bear the Medici name, but members of Florence's first family were the owners of this monolithic building for many centuries. Brunelleschi designed and built the original palace in 1458 for the rich and powerful Luca Pitti, a business rival to Cosimo (the Elder) di Medici. Luca Pitti never completed the palace because his own banking speculations and the cost of such a grandiose building financially ruined him. In 1549 Luca's grandson Bonaccorso was ironically forced to sell Luca's glorious palace to Eleanora, the Duchess of Toledo, the rich and beautiful wife of Cosimo I di Medici.
The palace remained the seat of the Medici court and the family's successors, the Austrian Grand Dukes of Lorraine, for some three centuries, until 1859 when the Grand Duchy of Florence was annexed to the unified Kingdom of Italy. The palace and its courtyard were the focus for dazzling public royal events and celebrations, including the weddings, baptisms and funerals of the Medici, Hapsburg-Lorraine's and the King's of Italy. Despite the fact that the Pitti Palace has hosted all of the ruling families of Florence, Tuscany and Italy from the 16th century on; the Medici's, the Lorraine's, the Bourbon's, the Bonaparte's and the Savoy's, Florentines, conservative by nature, have always refused to call it a royal palace.
Our carefully researched tour guides you through the majestic Palatine Galleries and the Royal Apartments as a professional narrator accompanied by historically appropriate background music points out and describes the most significant works of art done by some of the most hallowed names in Italian and European art. Shatter your idea of history, throw down your guidebook and venture off to see and hear the stories behind this magnificent, some might say ostentatious, Renaissance palace.
Guides are recorded in easy to follow segments that are readily located your iPod. This 3 hour and 50 minute 42 track, audio tour is designed to work with an easy to read building diagram, with clearly numbered locations, which coordinate with the track numbers and descriptions displayed on your iPod.
Author / Spoken By Bill Browne / Christopher Kent
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