The newly renovated Vasari Corridor opened to all in May 2024. As my always intelligent and attentive readers will know, access to the Vasari Corridor, which runs from the Palazzo Vecchio, via the Uffici Galleries and over the Ponte Vecchio, to the Pitti Palace in Florence, has always been problematic. The renovated Vasari Corridor re-opened 450 years after the death of its creators: the Grand Duke Cosimo I dei Medici, who commissioned the Corridor on the occasion of the wedding of his son Francesco I and who passed away on 21 April 1574, and Giorgio Vasari, who designed and built it and who died on 27 June 1574, just two months after Cosimo I.
Entry to the renovated Vasari Corridor is available to everyone who has a ticket to enter the Uffizi Galleries and who has paid the Corridor visit supplement. Pre-booking a time slot and prepaying the supplement to access the Corridor is highly recommended. Visitors are grouped (groups of 25 persons) by time of entry and accompanied by two Uffizi staff members. You cannot leave the group nor linger long in the Corridor.
I am no longer enthusiastic about paying the extra to walk through the Vasari Corridor. The corridor is one-way. You enter from inside the Uffizi, walk over Ponte Vecchio through a 760 m hallway and exit at the Pitti Palace courtyard. You cannot walk back to the Uffizi through the corridor. You cannot retrieve anything from the Uffizi cloakroom. The museum is closed to you for the day. In addition, your Uffizi entry is locked to 2 hours before your corridor slot. Not earlier. The Uffizi needs 3 to 5 hours to explore thoroughly. This ticket caps you at 2 hours. You will rush the Botticelli rooms, skip the Caravaggios, and end the visit staring at your watch.
And what do you get for all this. A hallway. The famous self-portrait collection that made the corridor interesting is gone.
The renovated Vasari Corridor
The ready accessibility of the corridor is very positive but I have to admit to feeling a bit sad about the relocation of the largest, oldest and most important collection of self-portraits in the world, which used to line the walls of the Corridor towards the Pitti Palace end. This collection, which was admirably displayed in the Corridor and directly linked to the creators of the Corridor, has been transferred to the Uffizi Galleries. The self-portraits have been replaced in the Corridor by a series of Roman epigraphs related to the Florence founded by Julius Caesar in 59 BC, and later becoming the capital of the VI Roman Legio that included Tuscany and Umbria. Obviously, these marble plaques are nowhere near as fragile as the paintings, so I suppose this is the price we must pay for free access to the Vasari Corridor.
The Vasari Corridor before renovation.
This, of course, is by no means the first time the Vasari Corridor has been renovated. Up until the late 19 C, there were artisanal workshops built into the arches supporting the Corridor between the Uffizi and the Ponte Vecchio. Those were removed during the 1880's.
View of the Vasari Corridor in the 1880's with workshops still in place.
For full official details for visits to the Vasari Corridor, click here.
More about the Vasari Corridor.
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Author: Anna Maria Baldini
