Purchased in 1550 by Cosimo I de'Medici and his wife Eleonora di Toledo to transform it into the new grand-ducal residence, Palazzo Pitti soon became the symbol of the consolidated power of the Medici on Tuscany. Palace of two other dynasties, that of the Habsburg-Lorraine (successors of the Medici from 1737) and of the Savoy, who inhabited it as the royal family of Italy since 1865, Palazzo Pitti still bears the name of its first owner, the Florentine banker Luca Pitti, who in the mid-fifteenth century wanted to build it - perhaps based on Brunelleschi's design - on the other side of the Arno, at the foot of the Boboli hill.
It is currently home to four different museums: the Treasury of the Grand Dukes on the ground floor, the Palatine Gallery and the Royal Apartments on the main floor of the Palace, the Gallery of Modern Art and the Museum of Fashion and Costume on the second floor.

Palazzo Pitti, a gigantic rusticated rustic stone on the slopes of the Boboli hill, is the largest of the Florentine palaces and well testifies to the power of those who chose it as their own royal residence.
Although it was inhabited for four centuries by three dynasties, the Medici, the Habsburg-Lorraine and the Savoy, the Palazzo still bears the name of its first owner, the Florentine merchant Luca Pitti, who had it built as a private residence of the fifteenth century. In 1473 Luca Pitti died leaving the project of Filippo Brunelleschi unfinished; the building then had only three large doors on the façade and a double order of seven windows. In 1549 the Palazzo, abandoned with the death of the merchant, was bought by Eleonora di Toledo, wife of Cosimo I de 'Medici as a place of representation worthy of the grandeur of the nascent Grand Duchy. Bartolomeo Ammannati, the favorite architect of the Grand Duke, enlarged the façade, the rear part and behind the Palazzo the magnificent Italian garden of Boboli was created. Garden and Palazzo were conceived together and together they developed over the following three centuries, in a close dialogue between art and nature that led Boboli to become the model for the palaces of all of Europe. Under the Lorraine, the two advancing wings of the Palace were built, with porticoes and terraces, called "Rondò". With these last works, the original spatial extension of the square was tripled.
Passed in 1860 between the Assets of the Crown of Italy and inhabited, in the years of Florence Capital (1865-1871) by Vittorio Emanuele II, Palazzo Pitti was donated in 1919 by Vittorio Emanuele III to the Italian State, together with the square and the Boboli's Garden.