Art Museums & Galleries — Firenze

Florence's second-most visited museum, founded in 1784 as an art school, now famous above all for housing the original of Michelangelo's David since 1873.

A fortress-turned-prison built from 1255, now Italy's first national sculpture museum, home to two Davids by Donatello and masterworks by Michelangelo, Verrocchio and Cellini.

A vast Renaissance palace begun in the 1450s for banker Luca Pitti, bought by the Medici in 1550 and expanded into a sprawling complex of galleries, apartments and the Boboli Gardens behind it.

One of the world's great art museums, built as Medici government offices by Giorgio Vasari from 1560 and home to Botticelli's Birth of Venus and masterpieces spanning centuries.