The Uffizi

The route starts on the top floor and comes down. The stops follow it.

1. The courtyard

Vasari had to pull down a whole quarter of old houses and most of a church to make room. The ground was river sand, so he set the building on a raft of masonry, and he used iron inside the stone to tie the long galleries together: one of the first times it was done.

The statues in the niches were added in the 1840s. They are the great men of Tuscany: Dante, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, and Amerigo Vespucci, who gave his name to America.

2. The corridors

The top floor is three corridors in the shape of a U, with the rooms opening off them. The corridors were the first gallery. Look up: the ceilings were painted in the 1580s with small monsters, birds and garlands, copied from the buried rooms of a Roman emperor's palace.

The Roman statues along the walls were what visitors of the 1700s came to see. The paintings, to them, were second.

3. Three Madonnas

The second room holds three very large pictures of the same subject, the Virgin on a throne with her child, painted within thirty years of each other for three churches. The two older ones are flat patterns of gold.

In the third, by Giotto, about 1310, the throne has depth. You can see into it. The Virgin has weight, and knees under her dress. European painting turns a corner in this room.

4. The duke with half a nose

Two small panels face each other like the pages of a book: a man in red and a woman in pearls, both exactly in profile, with a wide country behind them. He is Federico, Duke of Urbino, a soldier who hired himself and his army to whoever paid.

He is always painted from the left. He lost his right eye in a tournament, and had the bridge of his nose cut away so that his good eye could see across it. The duchess is pale because she was dead when the picture was made.

5. Botticelli

Spring, painted about 1480, was made for a Medici bedroom. Nine figures stand in an orange grove with a carpet of flowers at their feet. Botanists have named about a hundred and ninety kinds of flower in it, most of which bloom near Florence in March.

The Birth of Venus came a few years later. It is on canvas, which was then used for flags and stage sets, not for serious pictures. The goddess is the first large naked woman painted in Europe since the fall of Rome. Her neck is too long and her shoulder is impossible. Nobody has ever minded.

Botticelli was forgotten for three hundred years after his death. These two pictures hung in a country house until 1815.

6. The room of the shells

Halfway along the first corridor is an eight-sided room you may only look into. It was built in 1584 to hold the family's most precious things. The walls are red velvet. The dome is set with six thousand shells of mother-of-pearl.

For two centuries this was the most famous room in Europe. A painting of the 1770s shows it crowded with English gentlemen on their tour of Italy, peering at Venus through eyeglasses.

7. Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael

Leonardo painted the Annunciation at about twenty, still in his master's workshop. The angel's wings are a real bird's wings. The Virgin's right arm is too long: seen from the right and below, where the picture first hung, it comes right.

Michelangelo's round picture of the Holy Family was painted about 1506 for a rich weaver named Doni. The figures twist like sculpture and the colours are as sharp as sweets. Doni tried to pay less than the price agreed. Michelangelo doubled it.

Raphael's Madonna of the Goldfinch, of the same year, was broken into seventeen pieces when the house it hung in fell down in 1547. It was nailed together and painted over. The joins were only cleaned and mended properly in 2008.

8. Downstairs, and the window

On the floor below, in rooms with dark red walls, is a head with snakes for hair, mouth open, painted on a round shield of poplar wood. Caravaggio made it about 1597 and used his own face. The shield is curved outward; he has painted it so that it seems to curve in.

It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Upon the cloudy mountain-peak supine; Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; Its horror and its beauty are divine.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery, 1819; written of another Medusa in the same collection

Before you go down, stop at the windows where the two long corridors join. Below is the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio, the bridge with shops on it. Along the tops of the shops runs a row of small square windows. That is a private passage almost a kilometre long, built in five months in 1565 so that the duke could walk from his office to his house without meeting his subjects.

On the night of 27 May 1993 a car bomb planted by the Sicilian Mafia went off in the street behind the west wing. It killed five people, two of them children, and destroyed three paintings. A scar left on one wall has been kept.