Florence’s landmark passageway over Ponte Vecchio reopens to public

By Cristiano Corvino and Alvise Armellini

FLORENCE (Reuters) – A Renaissance-era raised passageway that connects Florence’s Uffizi Galleries to the Medici’s former residence, Palazzo Pitti, will reopen to the public on Saturday, offering spectacular views of the historic Italian city.

The Vasari Corridor, named after Giorgio Vasari, the 16th century architect, painter and art historian who designed it, snakes its way through central Florence, passing over the Arno river via the Ponte Vecchio bridge, one of the city’s landmarks.

The Uffizi museum, which manages the corridor and oversaw restoration and safety upgrades costing 11 million euros ($11.5 million), called it, in a statement, an “air tunnel” hovering over the heart of the city.

“The reopening is extremely important for us because … it is about returning to the public one of the most famous and fabled monuments of the Renaissance,” the head of the Uffizi Galleries, Simone Verde, told Reuters.

It was built in 1565, in just a few months, to allow Florence’s rulers to move freely between their home and Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of government, passing also through the Uffizi Galleries.

The corridor, which had been closed since 2016, will open to groups of up to 25 people at a time, who can walk through it from the Uffizi to the Pitti’s Boboli Gardens, crossing over the Arno from the right bank to the left.

In recent decades the passageway hosted the Uffizi’s vast number of self-portraits, but in its newly restored state its walls were stripped of all paintings and left bare as they were five centuries ago.

Tickets for a combined visit to the corridor and the Uffizi, whose outstanding collection includes works by Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian and Botticelli, must be booked in advance and cost 43 euros ($44.60).($1 = 0.9644 euros)

(Addional reporting by Roberto Mignucci and Remo Casilli, editing by Alex Richardson)