The new Vasari Corridor will be opened in May 2024. It will be accessible to all

The “new” Vasari Corridor will be inaugurated on May 27, 2024: “It will represent an event of extraordinary significance, both for the city and for the region, because it occurs 450 years after the death of the two great creators of this magnificent work: Grand Duke Cosimo I dei Medici, who commissioned the Corridor on the occasion of his son Francesco I’s wedding and who passed away on April 21, 1574, and Giorgio Vasari, who designed and built it and who died on June 27, just two months after Cosimo I,” said Tuscany Region President Eugenio Giani.

“At 450 years after the death of two figures who made history and changed the face of Florence and Tuscany,” he continued, “it is an exceptional event not only the reopening of a work that connects Palazzo Vecchio and Palazzo Pitti passing through the Uffizi and over the Ponte Vecchio, but above all its reopening in a new way: for everyone. While in the past, in fact, it was possible to go through the Vasari Corridor only by booking a year in advance and in small groups accompanied by a guide, now, thanks to the renovation and adaptation, entry and enjoyment will be allowed to all visitors.”

President Giani then stated: “And those who will now walk through these magnificent 960 meters that Vasari designed and built in just six months will be able to enjoy no longer the largest, oldest and most important collection of self-portraits in the world, which, as we know, has been transferred to the Uffizi Gallery, but a series of Roman epigraphs that tell of a Florence founded by the Romans, that is, by Julius Caesar in 59 B.C.C. and then part of Rome, first republican then imperial, to the point of becoming the capital of the VI Roman Legio that included Tuscany and Umbria in the division of the peninsula into 12 Legiones.” “Cosimo I dei Medici commissioned the Corridor in 1565, to coincide with the marriage between his son Francis I and Archduchess Joanna of Austria, a marriage that sanctioned the link between the Medici and Habsburg families, legitimizing it four years later, in 1569, when it became the subject of Pius V’s Papal Bull that defined Cosimo as ’Magnus Dux Etruria,’ that is, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Perhaps it was that marriage, graced by the inauguration of cotantas, that convinced the Pope first, and the emperor later, that Tuscany was a state.”

“The fact therefore,” Giani concludes, “that the Vasari Corridor is once again open to visitors, for me, president of the region, is a great honor and signifies the enjoyment for all of our cultural heritage. I thank Eike Schmidt for the perseverance and care he has dedicated to a work that, in just over six months, will allow all citizens to experience the thrill of walking through a corridor counted among the symbols of Florence and Tuscany.” “Finally, I would like to thank Raymond and Marisa Avansino and the Edwin L. Wiegand Foundation for their important contribution, which will make it possible to complete the work of adaptation and refitting. May 27, 2024, will also mark the anniversary of the Georgofili massacre: the inauguration on this date was a wise decision that will lend greater resonance to the message that the Vasari Corridor will represent, that of a Path of Memory.”

In fact, the Uffizi Galleries has received $1 million to create the new layout of the Vasarian Corridor, work on which is currently underway, from the Edwin L. Wiegand Foundation of Reno, Nevada, represented by Raymond Avansino, Chair and Chief Executive Officer, and Marisa Avansino, Co-Vice Chair and President.

The new Vasari Corridor will be opened in May 2024. It will be accessible to all

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