PALAZZO PITTI, Royal Apartments

Once back at the entrance on the first floor, if you like you can continue your tour of the museum by going to the most monumental part of Palazzo Pitti located in the right wing, where you can visit the large White Hall decorated with refined Neoclassical stuccoes, and the Royal Apartments.

The apartments comprise fourteen rooms that were made ready in just a few years' time starting in 1865, when Vittorio Emanuele II of Savoy decided to move the capital of the young Kingdom of Italy from "his" Turin to the more central Florence, and chose Palazzo Pitti for his royal residence. Six years later, when the capital was definitively moved to Rome, the apartment became the residence for the official visits of King Umberto I and his wife, Queen Margherita.

When in 1912 the new King Vittorio Emanuele III ceded the entire Palazzo Pitti to the Italian state, the Royal Apartments were preserved with their late-nineteenth century furnishings, as testimony to the six years when Florence was the capital of Italy....