For nearly two decades, the skyline of Florence, Italy’s most iconically Renaissance city, has showcased a majestic dome by the architect Brunelleschi, a striking bell tower by the artist Giotto, another 14th-century tower above City Hall — and a yellow, 197-foot crane towering over the Uffizi Galleries.
No more.
This week, the crane looming over one of the world’s greatest art museums was finally dismantled, to locals’ collective relief.
Carlo Francini, the official in charge of Florence’s municipal museums, called it “an important day for the city.” One local newspaper’s front page put it more bluntly: “Goodbye to the crane: the giant beached in front of the Uffizi.”
“We’re all happy,” said Giacomo Tempesta, an architect who came to the Uffizi on Monday as workers began deconstructing the crane. “For years it wasn’t possible to take a photograph that didn’t include the crane; it was a cumbersome presence. It was time that they took it down.”
The crane was hoisted in 2006 in the inner courtyard of the Uffizi as work began to expand the museum. And it just … stayed.
The museum, which is housed in an old Medici office complex and has an extraordinary collection, intended to expand its exhibition spaces and become more navigable for visitors. A lot of work has been done, but parts of the project are still underway.
Architectural experts pointed out that mounting and dismantling a crane is expensive, so it made sense that it would stay put while major work on the museum was still taking place. But the Florentines, and many of the 12 million to 15 million tourists who visit the city each year, hated it. Protests ebbed and flowed over the years — to no avail.
“A few months ago, an elderly man stopped me and said: ‘I’m more than 80 years old. I beg you, before I die, let me see the courtyard without a crane,’” Simone Verde, the director of the Uffizi, said in an interview in his office on Wednesday.
Even though the museum revamp is still underway, Mr. Verde, who was appointed director in January 2024, said that construction programs had been reorganized so that the crane would no longer be needed and could be removed.
“It wasn’t an easy adventure; the reorganization took a year,” he said. The construction site will remain, but scaffolding will be put up as needed.
Now, for many Florentines, Mr. Verde’s achievements during his 18 months running the museum — revamping galleries, restoring royal apartments, reopening a corridor between the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace that had been closed for eight years — pale in comparison to his engineering what many believed was an insurmountable task.
Asked why the crane had not been removed earlier, Mr. Verde tactfully said: “Let’s talk about something else.” But he seemed amused by the local frenzy that had accompanied the operation, saying, “We only removed a crane; we haven’t built a pyramid.”
The crane was certainly a presence, an unavoidable eyesore in countless photographs.
It even inspired a first-person account on Instagram, mostly in English, titled, “Gru in Florence The Uffizi Crane.” “Gru” is Italian for “crane.” (The corresponding account on Facebook is mostly in Italian, because Italians tend to be more old-school, the account manager said.)
Both are managed by an influencer who lives in Florence and declined to give her name “because it would kind of ruin the magic, you know what I mean?” she said, adding, “The crane is her own person.”
She started the account as a joke, thinking of “people who spend their whole lives hoping to come here and then, you know, take wedding photos and there’s a giant crane in the background.”
Omnipresent in photos for 19 years, the crane took less than two days to be dismantled by workers. “It’s almost depressing,” the influencer said, “because I’d become attached to it.”
She may shift her sights to another crane at the Uffizi, which has been there just as long. Installed in a courtyard behind the museum after the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki won a competition to design a new exit for the Uffizi in 2000, it, too, has become a fixture. This crane, however, does not ruin photographs, as it is too short to be seen against the Florentine skyline.
After more than two decades of on-and-off debate, in October 2023, the government decided that Mr. Isozaki’s exit would not be built after all. But the crane is still there.
On Monday, the second, smaller crane hoisted wooden planks above a cordoned-off construction site. Stepping out of his home just across the street, Fulvio Baldeschi, a lighting designer, said — with no small dose of sarcasm — that he had been living “with this beautiful panorama and entertaining sounds” for longer than he would care to remember. But he had the distinct sensation that workers were merely “moving things from one side to the other.”
He added: “Nothing changes.”
Elisabetta Povoledo is a Times reporter based in Rome, covering Italy, the Vatican and the culture of the region. She has been a journalist for 35 years.
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