Palazzo Vecchio

On my last morning in Florence, I went to Palazzo Vecchio to have a look around the museum and tower. As I was 25 at the time, I was able to get a discount on my entrance ticket. Normally these age discounts only apply to EU residents but their sign did not mention that restriction. In front of the Palazzo Vecchio is the Loggia dei Lanzi, an open air gallery of sculptures.

Walking into the courtyard of the museum, I admired the details of it and headed up the stairs to the museum. 

Right away I entered the Hall of Five Hundred, a large room covered in large murals on the walls and a beautiful painted ceiling.  The room was built for the meetings of the higher council which was made up of 500 members so that is why it is named that. The murals are by Giorgio Vasari and in one of them he put a small green flag with the words Cerca Trova which means basically seek and find. I had read about this in Dan Brown's Inferno and I mean that little flag is soooo tiny. There are so many murals in that room and they are all so big with such detail that it was hard to find the flag. I had to ask the guide to help me and then use my cameras zoom to get to the flag. Standing from the floor, you can see the flag but you can't pick out the words. It was crazy the detail and I wonder why Vasari put in this secret message.

Cerca trova became by motto for exploring the Palazzo Vecchio. Climbing stairs and entering rooms. They had most of the details of each room mapped out and also in English for those poor people not fluent in Italian, aka me.

Looking down at the Hall of Five Hundred from above, the room is just so big. It's huge!

What I loved about the building was that almost every room had paintings on the walls, murals on the ceilings. It's beautiful.

The Dante Alighieri death mask that is on show in the museum. Apparently it is not actually his death mask but a mask of a sculpture.

I found the map room which was really cool as it had all these old maps. It was very interesting to see the world from the way people used to see it. 

I climbed up to the upper level, heading to climb the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. Even though I had climbed all the stairs of the Duomo and the bell tower, I climbed the tower. It is a lot less stairs but it still was not easy. I hate stairs but I like climbing things for their view and what a view it was.

From up high, I looked over the square and played around with the zoom on my camera as well as the toy setting which I have been enjoying. There is a lot of horse drawn carriages in Florence, poor horses.