Florence had been one of my favourite cities in Europe for its great art, history and of course, shopping, but it is getting impossible to roam around these days without encountering crowds of tourists. This does make having a pleasant trip more challenging so I highly recommend that visitors who want to visit the museums and other historical sites to do so with a guide. I arranged a private tour to visit the Vasari Corridor, a secret Medici passageway while in Florence last year and it was one of the best decisions I made.
I’ve been visiting Florence once every three to four years since 1988. As I was almost an art history major, it’s like a pilgrimage for me and I’ve always been fascinated by the Medicis. On my last trip I wanted to see some sites that I’d not visited before and basically do something that didn’t involve shopping. I’d read that the Vasari Corridor, a secret passageway linking the Uffizi Gallery to the Pitti Palace and which runs above the Ponte Vecchio, had reopened to visitors after a restoration but only via guided tours.
Since my relatives had not been to the Uffizi, we opted to ask for a combined tour of the Uffizi and the Vasari Corridor. I booked my tour from Florence Pass (http://www.florencepass.com) – pricing from the various operators is roughly the same – based on positive reviews from TripAdvisor.com about the guide’s knowledge. Since there were ten of us, a private tour worked out really nicely as it meant we could control the timing of our visit to what suited our schedule.
From the moment that our guide took us to the side entrance of the Uffizi where there was absolutely no queue, I knew that the price of the tour was already worth it. Invaluable since we were only in Florence for the day.
Our guide gave us head phones so that we could hear him without him having to shout over the other groups visiting the Uffizi. It was a great way to introduce the Uffizi’s masterpieces and the building itself to my relatives – kind of like cliff’s notes – painless and with enough story to keep everyone’s interest. But the Vasari Corridor was the highlight for me.
The corridor is so named because it was built by Giorgio Vasari in 1564 for Cosimo de Medici, the first grand duke of Tuscany. The corridor runs around one kilometre from the Uffizi to the Pitti Palace over the Ponte Vecchio. The suspicion is that the grand duke used the corridor to spy on folks especially over the Ponte Vecchio as goods were traded and money was borrowed but mainly it’s because he didn’t feel secure walking among the crowds. So ironically, we also escaped the crowds by walking through the Vasari Corridor.
The corridor is also famous as Adolf Hitler visited it during World War II and many say that the reason the Ponte Vecchio was spared from bombing as the Nazis retreated was because he liked the bridge. A couple of the windows were enlarged to give Hitler a view of the Arno. I didn’t realise it at the time, but it is quite chilling to have stood there in his footsteps as I took a picture of the Arno – I wonder if he did the same.
It was also amusing to me because I happened to look out one of the windows to see my mom walking on the Ponte Vecchio. She had opted not to join us on our tour as she wanted to shop. So I can attest to the Vasari Corridor being a useful spying agent.
As we headed toward to the Oltrano, the Vasari Corridor shares a facade with the Santa Felicita church. Access from the corridor enabled the Medicis to be at worship without others knowing.
The corridor ends in the garden of the Pitti Palace. There’s an amusing statue here of a rotund bacchus – and you can just imagine the toilet humour that erupted from my husband and his brothers. Nothing like a low brow moment to offset a high brow day.