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The tower
The tower is off centre because an older tower sits inside it
Arnolfo di Cambio built the 94 metre tower on top of an older one, the Foraboschi tower known as La Vacca, so it sits off centre. Two small cells in it held Cosimo de' Medici in 1435 and Girolamo Savonarola in 1498.
A lost battle
Leonardo used hot coals to dry his wall painting, and it was lost
In 1503 Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned to paint a battle scene on one long wall. He mixed wax into his pigments, and when the paint dried too slowly he brought in braziers of hot coals. The Battle of Anghiari was lost when the hall was remade.
The other wall
Michelangelo never painted his wall, and his sketches were taken as scraps
Michelangelo was commissioned for the opposite wall but never went beyond preparatory drawings. Pope Julius II called him to Rome to paint the Sistine Chapel, and young artists who came to study his sketches took away scraps.
“You Florentines are the quintessence.”
Boniface VIII, in a fresco above the Udienza
The peep-hole
Francesco I had a secret study with a peep-hole onto the great hall
Giorgio Vasari designed the studiolo, a small windowless secret study, between 1570 and 1575. From a peep-hole, Francesco spied on his ministers and officers meeting in the Salone dei Cinquecento. It was dismantled within decades and reassembled in the 20th century.
At the door
A copy of the David stands where the original stood until 1873
Michelangelo's David stood at the entrance from its completion in 1504 until 1873, when it moved to the Accademia. A replica put up in 1910 now stands there, next to Baccio Bandinelli's Hercules and Cacus.
Day 1, afternoon
It comes after Piazza della Signoria. Then Ponte Vecchio.
More stories from this trip idea
The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Palazzo Vecchio, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.