The Vasari Corridor was designed and constructed by Giorgio Vasari in 1565 to connect the Palazzo Vecchio with the Pitti Palace. It was commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici to celebrate the wedding of his son Francesco I with Joanna of Austria. The construction took a brief 5 months to complete, just on time for the wedding celebrated on December 18th. The corridor was a way to impress foreign visitors that attended the wedding and to show its power and influence in the city. The corridor connect the Pitti Palace where foreign visitors were housed) and the Palazzo Vecchio (where the celebration happened). It is a connection of several distinct and different structures, each looking different in relation to its surrounding context. The corridor did not disrupt or alter any of its environment, but it supplements and acts as a palimpsest to the existing setting. Such a discrete connection on the urban fabric might lead others to think that it’s a secret passageway for the Medici family, but instead it was for privacy, security, and a way to legitimize their power in Florence.
The corridor travels almost a half mile, but it is visible to the people along the Arno and on the Ponte Vecchio; its integration with the façade of S. Felicita makes it almost unnoticeable. Its interior width of approximately 5 ½ braccia was sufficient to accommodate carriages drawn by court retainers that regularly passed the distance between the two palaces. The privacy which Cosimo had desired by erecting the corridor was a privilege of rulers since the Golden Age of Greece. According to Alberti, both convenience and raw political power justified the construction of private passageways or entrances. It is a means of escaping during a civil unrest and to stay away from the troublesome commoners. Private passageways were neither limited to fortifications nor constructed solely by despotic rulers. Passageways, in fact, played a critical role in creating family enclaves within medieval cities. The corridor, to Alberti offers both efficiency and escape. The Vasari corridor was design not just for the wedding that happened on the 18th of December 1565, but it was a way to connect his seat of power and his place of enjoyment; two of these significant places were crucial in separating the rulers and the ruled.
“Above (the Ponte Vecchio), the Gallery of the Grand Duke crosses the river. It was built to connect the two great places by a secret passage, and it rakes its jealous course among the streets and houses with true despotism; going where it wishes, and spurning every obstacle away, which goes before it.”
-Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy
Above: vasari corridor above a row of loggia facing the Arno River, showing it’s discrete and mysterious quality where one will never know who’s above from below.
Right: Portrait Bust of Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, ca. 1549-1572, Pentelic marble by Benvenuto Cellini
Cosimo de’ Medici was born in 1519, where his family tree roots could be trace back to Giovanni di Bicci (the founder of the Medici fortune and line). At the age of 17, after the assassination of Alessandro de’Medici, he was sworn as the Duke of Florence, then the Grand Duke of Tuscany in1569.
Above: The vasari corridor discretely connecting both the Uffizi Gallery and the Pitti Palace through the urban fabric of Florence.
Above: A view of Ponte Vecchio from the Vasari Corridor where the Medici Family are constantly “above” the people of Florence, overlooking their everyday lifes.
Above: The original floor plan of the Ponte Vecchio measured in braccia shows the symmetry and simplicity before Vasari’s addition of the corridor.
The Ponte Vecchio, as Lisa Jane Neal claimed that it’s hardly seem like a bridge, for in the center was a piazza that showed a panoramic vista of the river and the surrounding river. The bridge was built from 1339-1346 and is the only Florentine bridge to main its mid-fourteenth century vaulted substructure and a substantial portion of its urban superstructure. The bridge initially had a more symmetrical appearance but was then altered to fit Vasari’s corridor, which made the east side of the bridge taller than the west. The Ponte Vecchio is and has always been loved by the Florentine and is seen as a “civic monument with the potential to bring beauty and honor to the city.” Despite the bridge being built during the medieval times, Theresa Flanigan argues that the Ponte Vecchio was design according to rational principles that incorporated “pure geometry, mathematically related proportions, and a modular systems.”
The appearance of the Ponte Vecchio changed drastically after Vasari designed the corridor that was being placed above the bridge. . Vasari’s corridor had small circular windows above the streets and the Arno. In the 16th Century, the shops that occupied Ponte Vecchio were butcher shops and it was common for the store vendors to throw waste down the Arno River. It caused problems such as hygiene issue, smell and a bad view for foreign visitors who visited the Medici Family. That was when the butcher shops were evicted off the Ponte Vecchio and were replaced by goldsmiths. The Medici family had a panoramic view of the entire city of Florence and at the same time, overlooking the people of Florence by being above them. The three large windows on Ponte Vecchio was not part of Vasari’s design. Instead, it was enlarged by Benito Mussolini in 1939 so that he could impress Adolf Hitler with the beautiful landscape of Florence. During World War II, Adolf Hitler destroyed all bridges on the Arno River except for the Ponte Vecchio as he adored the bridge dearly.
Above: A photo collage showing the Vasari Corridor being attached to the front facade to Santa Felicita with classical arches below this corridor.
Above: A View of Santa Felicita from the balcony that overhangs from the Vasari Corridor
The corridor gave Vasari the opportunity to design his only completed church façade too, which is the Santa Felicita. Before the construction of the corridor, the façade of Santa Felicita was like any other Florentine churches, where it was a plain and unadorned wall. Vasari designed the corridor in a way where it passes through the front façade of the church as it was unlikely that he could design a new façade for the church to disguise the passageway without radically changing the architectural vocabulary. Vasari made an effort to make the Corridor as disruptive as possible to its surrounding neighbours and at the same time, making it more integral with the church. This was achieved by the manipulation of floor levels where he used arches below the corridor to give it a “classical” proportion to the front façade. For the sake for a facade with correct proportion and ratios, the floor level of the corridor rises considerably between Ponte Vecchio and the church. In the interior of the corridor that connects with the church, the Medici Family had a different view of the Church compared to the regular civilians. A balcony was attached into the church that looks directly into the choir from the second floor where the Medici Family could attend Holy Mass from a “strategic and privileged” point of view. Similar to the corridor at Ponte Vecchio, the Medici family was able to overlook the people of Florence, without having the people knowing they were being watched. This gave the family tremendous power and control over the city of Florence.
The corridor allowed an easy and convenient access between the Medici’s work and leisure life. It preserves and adapts to the existing context ( only one house was destroyed for its construction), and it operates simultaneously on several different scales where it is able to exist in different conditions and scenarios. The Vasari Corridor is a great example of soft power existing in the urban fabric as the corridor has such a big presence contextually but causes minimal changes to the existing fabric during construction. It is gentle and soft in appearance, but at the same time reaffirms and legitimizes the power of the Medici Family. The corridor enabled the rulers to have full control of the city, without having any of its people knowing that they were being watched. It’s discrete yet so powerful. That is why it makes the Vasari so unique; the corridor with an underestimated amount of power where the regular civilian will truly never understand or feel it.
Above: Grotte de Buontalenti inside Pitti Palace where the red bars indicates an exit from the Vasari Corridor into the palace. The Vasari corridor ends with the Pitti Palace, the residence of Cosimo I de’ Medici and his wife Eleanor of Toledo, in which he purchased the palace in 1550. Before getting into the Pitti Palace, there is a secret doorway next to the Bountalenti Grotto where it allowed easy access into the Vasari Corridor from the garden.
