The Italian and art history course allows you to discover the wonders of Florence in the company of your teacher.

In the morning you can study the Italian language in the group course at your level, together with people coming from different parts of the world.

In the afternoon you will have 10 hours of individual lessons per week, during which you will explore your passion for Italian art history in a pleasant and relaxing way.

The lessons will take you to discover the rich artistic heritage of the city: you will visit the monuments, the churches, the palaces and the gardens that you have always wanted to see and that until then you had only seen in photographs.

Among the visits we suggest there will be the one to Palazzo Pitti. The palace, located in the square of the same name, was commissioned by Luca Pitti, a Florentine banker and merchant, rival of the Medici family. Luca Pitti wanted a residence more sumptuous than the one built for Cosimo the Elder. His new palace absolutely had to have two features: the whole of Palazzo Pitti had to fit inside the square in front of the palace, and its windows had to be larger than the main door. In fact there are no historical documents proving this request, but everything seems to match.

At the time it was built, Palazzo Pitti was the largest and most opulent private residence in Florence, and the presence of a large square in front of the palace was a novelty too. Later it became the residence of the Medici, giving rise to the rebirth of the Oltrarno district, where the Florentine noble families competed in the construction of beautiful residences in the nearby streets of Via Maggio and Via dei Serragli. Its facade is very wide and is covered with a characteristic structure called “bugnato” (rustication): rough and irregular stones that protrude outwards and become less thick as they rise in height. This technique was probably useful for the dripping of rainwater, and it is used in many other noble Florentine palaces.

And here is a curiosity: among so many irregular stones there are two that are more irregular than the others. One is about ten metres long and the other, not far from the first, is very short, less than fifty centimetres. The use of these two stones has no structural or architectural reason, but only a symbolic one. Legend has it that the patron, Luca Pitti, had these two blocks installed so that the longest of all the stones would symbolise himself, and the other, the smallest one, his rivals, envious and full of anger because he had accumulated such success and such wealth that he could build a residence like this.

Do you want to know where the two stones are and see them for real? We are waiting for you at Italianme!