Palazzo Vecchio: Secret Passages with Giorgio Vasari - Guided tour in Japanese

In 1555 Giorgio Vasari, painter, architect, and writer from Arezzo (author of Lives of the most illustrious painters, culptors and architects) was responsible for the restoration works of Palazzo Vecchio and engineered an immense operation for rendering the innumerable rooms, halls, chambers, antechambers, and stairways making up the Palazzo more organized and practical. Thanks to his numerous skills, he was able to oversee not only the architectural and structural operations, but also the decorative aspects, thus endowing the works with great uniformity. Moreover, the collaboration between Vasari and Cosimo was tight-knit and their relationship characterised by mutual friendship and trust. A tireless worker, active in all the most important Florentine sites organised by the Duke (just think of the Uffizi and the Vasarian Corridor), Vasari was a magnificent supervisor who directed and coordinated a huge team of workers. Who then could be more suited than Giorgio Vasari himself to take visitors on a tour of Palazzo Vecchio, helping them to understand the extraordinary commitment he was called on to make in order to turn a “palazzo stato murato a caso…” (haphazardly erected palazzo) into a palace? The animator-actor who impersonates Giorgio Vasari leads the public through the Secret Passages of the Palazzo. Each site represents a different moment in the professional and human life of this great artist: the stairway of the Duke of Athens symbolises the past life of the Palazzo; the Tesoretto of Cosimo I is one of the peaks of his work, the result of a deep understanding with the Duke, likewise the trusses of the ceiling of the Salone dei Cinquecento; while the Studiolo of Francesco I is the creation of a by-then elderly artist, whose style was far removed from that of the new Duke, Francesco, Cosimo’s son.