Napoleon slept here, too?

Massive and brutish, the Palazzo Pitti was original built as a home for the Florentine banker, Lucas Pitti in 1458, later purchased and enlarged by the Medicis, and from then on it was the seat of Florentine power until it was turned into a museum in 1919. Even Napoleon Bonaparte used it as his Italian palace; his royal bathroom and tub is displayed in all its glory.

Once inside, the museum wasn't as imposing as it looked from the outside. The rooms (former bed chambers, sitting rooms, billiard rooms and the like) are smallish for a museum and the paintings are hung salon style. Each room has very clear descriptions of the paintings, so moving through is actually fun and informative.

Above is the Venus Room with this stellar Titian Portrait of a Young Woman (below). It is the same model he also used for his famous Venus of Urbino (in the Uffizi Museum, Florence).

Titian's Venus of Urbino in the Uffizi.

The Boboli Gardens are out back. "Gardens" is a bit of an understatement, it's a huge park meant, I can only imagine, to be traversed by horse and buggy.

The view from the start of the Boboli Garden looking at the back door of the Pitti.

There are a few curiosities in the garden, such as this grotto by the artist Giambologna. Two of of Michelangelo's prisoners were jammed into the darn thing at one point, but someone wisely decided to remove them and leave copies.

My walk home from the Palazzo Pitti at half past noon was a very different than my walk there at eight in the morning. In these two photos of the Ponte Vecchio that I crossed on the way to and from the Palazzo Pitti, see if you can tell how it was different.