Purchased in 1550, the Palace was chosen by Cosimo I de’ Medici and his wife Eleanor of Toledo as the new Grand Ducal residence, and it soon became the new symbol of the Medici’s power over Tuscany. It was also the royal palace of other two dynasties: the House of Lorraine-Habsburg (which succeeded the Medici from 1737) and the Kings of Italy of the House of Savoy, who inhabited it from 1865. Nonetheless the palace still bears the name of its first owner, the Florentine banker Luca Pitti that in the mid-1400s started its construction – maybe  after a design by Brunelleschi – at the foot of the Boboli hill beyond the Arno river.

Today the Palace is divided into four museums: the Treasury of the Grand Dukes on the ground floor, the Palatine Gallery and the Imperial and Royal Apartments on the first floor, the Modern Art Gallery and the Museum of Costume and Fashion on the second floor.