Italy, Unhurried

Begun in 1560 by Giorgio Vasari as the administrative offices — uffizi — of Cosimo I de' Medici, the building was turning into a gallery within a generation as the family hung their treasures along its top floor. When the last Medici heir, Anna Maria Luisa, died in 1743, she bequeathed the entire collection to the city of Florence on the condition it never leave — making the Uffizi one of the first public art museums in the world.

The collection runs roughly chronologically, from Giotto and the Gothic through the full bloom of the Renaissance to Caravaggio and the Baroque. With a private guide you'll move efficiently to the essentials rather than its 100-odd rooms.

Gucci is one of the world's most recognized luxury houses — and it began a few steps from where you'll be standing. Guccio Gucci was born in Florence in 1881. As a young man he took a job as a porter and bellhop at London's grand Savoy Hotel, where he watched wealthy travelers arrive with beautifully made leather luggage. That image stayed with him.

Returning to Florence, he learned the city's centuries-old leather and saddlery crafts and, in 1921, opened his own shop selling fine luggage and goods. The house grew directly out of Tuscan craftsmanship — which is why equestrian details like the horse-bit and the woven-bamboo bag handle (improvised when leather was scarce after the war) became signatures. The Gucci Garden, opened in 2018 inside the 14th-century Palazzo della Mercanzia on Piazza della Signoria, is part archive-museum and part boutique.

Founded in 1784 as a teaching collection for the Academy of Fine Arts, the Accademia became world-famous for one reason: in 1873 Michelangelo's David was moved here from the open air of Piazza della Signoria to shield it from the elements, and a domed Tribune was built to display it.

Carved between 1501 and 1504 when Michelangelo was in his twenties, the David emerged from a single block of Carrara marble that two earlier sculptors had given up on as flawed. The approach to it — down a corridor lined with the unfinished Prisoners — is a deliberate piece of theatre.

Florence's cathedral was begun in 1296 but left with a gaping hole where its crossing should be: no one knew how to roof a span that wide. In 1418 a goldsmith named Filippo Brunelleschi won the commission with a radical idea — a self-supporting double-shell dome raised without the usual wooden centering, using a herringbone brick pattern that locked each course in place. Completed in 1436, it remains the largest masonry dome ever built and the emblem of the Renaissance.

The interior is surprisingly austere, which makes the explosion of color overhead — Vasari and Zuccari's Last Judgment swirling inside the cupola — all the more dramatic.

The Medici bought this colossal Oltrarno palace in 1550 and made it their grand-ducal residence; later it housed the dukes of Lorraine and, briefly, the kings of a newly united Italy. The Palatine Gallery preserves that palace character — paintings hung floor to ceiling by the personal taste of their collectors rather than by date or school, in rooms with Baroque frescoed ceilings by Pietro da Cortona.

It holds the largest concentration of works by Raphael anywhere, alongside Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens and Andrea del Sarto. Behind the palace, the Boboli Gardens are one of the earliest and most influential Italian formal gardens.

For more than a thousand years Venice was an independent maritime republic, and these two buildings were its sacred and secular hearts. St. Mark's Basilica — begun in 1063 to house the relics of the evangelist, said to have been smuggled from Alexandria — is a Byzantine treasure-house, its interior sheathed in over 8,000 square metres of golden mosaic.

Next door, the Gothic Doge's Palace was the seat of government, law courts, and the doge's apartments. Its grandest room, the Great Council Chamber, is dominated by Tintoretto's Paradise, among the largest oil paintings in the world.

The Vatican Museums grew over five centuries from the private collections of the popes, beginning when Julius II placed a newly excavated ancient statue — the Laocoön, unearthed in a Roman vineyard in 1506 — on public view. Today miles of galleries lead, by design, toward a single room.

That room is the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo painted the ceiling between 1508 and 1512 and, decades later, the Last Judgment on the altar wall. It is a working chapel — silence and no photography are enforced. Along the way you'll pass the Raphael Rooms, frescoed at the same moment just down the corridor.