The Medici-Riccardi Palace was home base for the Medici family, Florence’s famous bankers/dictators/art patrons. The more well-known paintings and sculptures commissioned by the Medici are elsewhere in Florence, but this palazzo retains some interesting things, such as copious amount of ancient crap set into baroque frames (“ancient crap” is the technical term for little broken bits and pieces of sarcophagi, architectural decoration, etc.) and the Chapel of the Magi, a tiny but high-intensity chapel painted with scenes of the Three Wise Men visiting the infant Jesus, in which almost every figure is a portrait of a Medici family member or associate, in a sort of “Hey Jesus – you need some myrrh? We got your myrrh right here!” fashion.
The palazzo also hosts temporary exhibitions, which are almost uniformly on my all-time list of most tedious collections of objects ever. This time it was an exhibition on science in 19th century Florence, a.k.a. “we spend our time making decorative cabinets in which to place the inventions produced by other countries.”
