Simone Verde, the director of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, Italy, arrived a few minutes late for an interview earlier this month, apologizing profusely. He’d been at the museum until 3:30 a.m., overseeing workers as they rehung Botticelli’s “Primavera” and had grabbed a few hours of sleep before returning to supervise the finishing touches on the newly revamped Botticelli rooms.
Botticelli’s depiction of an allegory of spring and his “Birth of Venus” are arguably the two top draws at the Uffizi, one of the world’s most visited museums. Verde was anxious to ensure that the installation of the works — now nestled in new made-to-measure cases that swing open to allow for easier inspection — went off without a hitch.
“We’ve been working incredibly hard,” Verde said, greatly exaggerating his native Roman accent, which is usually imperceptible.
Of late, there have been many long days, especially on Mondays, when the museum is closed to the public and the chatter of tourists — 5.3 million last year — is replaced by a cacophony of the drills, hammers and saws at some 25 worksites in the Uffizi and two other landmarks that Verde oversees: the Palazzo Pitti across the Arno River and the 81-acre Boboli Gardens.
Just over two years into a four-year mandate, Verde’s curatorial vision has been gaining ground. He aims to present the sites as living encyclopedias of museum history, to give visitors a sense of how — and why — the collections came together over the centuries. Each phase reflects the interests and priorities of their time, he said, adding that knowing their history helps understand the history of museum collecting.
The restored Botticelli rooms are a case in point. When they were last reorganized a decade ago, the curator at the time opted for a more contemporary presentation, encasing the principal paintings in oversized niches in a white-walled gallery.
Verde has returned to a more traditional hanging that reprises elements from the Uffizi’s past. The walls are now painted in what he called Renaissance gray, and a darker baseboard recalls the wood paneling that was in the gallery until the 1950s. Brass protective barriers reprise those designed during a modernist installation in the first half of the 20th century.
Elsewhere in the Uffizi, there are similar touches. New wooden benches that line the second-floor corridors are modern copies of the stone benches that the building’s architect, Giorgio Vasari, fashioned for the courtyard. Here, the brass barriers imitate ropes cordoning off sculptures, reprising 19th-century tastes.
There are also some 21st-century touches. New museum labels include a QR code — a first for the Uffizi — providing in-depth information, and digital monitors explain Botticelli’s connection to the Medici family that once ruled Florence.
In Verde’s vision, the palace where the family once lived, Palazzo Pitti, is an integral part of his mandate, though the museum often plays second fiddle to its more famous neighbor. “Historically, they are the same collection, part of the same history,” Verde said.
Cosimo I de’ Medici, the Duke of Florence, bought the palazzo in 1550 for his residence and soon commissioned Vasari to construct a new building for the city’s administrative offices, which today is the Uffizi Galleries. (“Uffizi” refers to “offices” in Italian.)
Visitors to Florence often don’t know that for three centuries the Pitti was home to three successive dynasties: the Medici, Habsburg-Lorraine and Savoy. Verde said he hoped to give the site its due. “You have no idea how much money we’ve spent on the Pitti, but I think we’re beginning to see the results,” Verde said.
This includes the renovation of the palazzo’s suite of royal apartments, one of the first projects he tackled when he arrived.
In their time, Florence’s Habsburg-Lorraine rulers selected some 500 pieces from the Medici collections and hung them in a ceremonial gallery in the Pitti called the Galleria Palatina, which they opened to the public. Several of its rooms are being renewed, a sprawling warren of scaffolding-lined worksites behind closed doors.
A project to renovate the “Vasari Corridor” connecting the Pitti and the Uffizi was completed in December 2024, and the revived thoroughfare now helps redistribute visitors between the sites.
But it’s not easy running crowd control at Italy’s second most visited attraction. (The Colosseum is the first.) Last year, a visitor backed into a painting while taking a selfie. Those are now technically verboten, even though Verde said guards usually turned a blind eye — though they are stricter about a ban on selfie sticks.
The Vasari corridor is lined with dozens of ancient Roman busts that once languished in the museum’s storerooms. “There are only seven left to place,” said Verde, who through renovations aims to also amplify the exhibition space of both museums. Prized tapestries and royal furnishings will also see the light of day again, he said.
The Boboli Gardens, at the back of the Palazzo Pitti, are also getting a makeover. “Managing a historical garden is like managing a collection — it’s a living museum,” Verde said.
Hundreds of trees and “thousands of other plants” have been replanted at the Boboli under the watchful eye of Gianni Simonti, the chief gardener. Architectural features including a 16th-century amphitheater and a small island at the center of a human-made lake are being restored to their prime.
Before arriving in Florence, Verde spent almost five years at the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and another seven revamping a cluster of museums in Parma, Italy. He seemed to be enjoying overhauling new his ward, made easier by the income that comes with managing such a popular site. The Uffizi made 68 million euros, about $78 million, in ticket sales last year, and Verde can also draw on other sources, including loan fees and donations.
The best was yet to come, he said in an interview in his attic office, where a small toy crane on his desk serves as a reminder of one the biggest headaches that he inherited: a reviled crane in the Uffizi courtyard that he finally managed to have dismantled last year to a collective Florentine sigh of relief.
A new restaurant is under construction on the Uffizi’s ground floor, and the entrance and ticket office will move to make room for a new section about the museum’s history. Verde said it would show “how the collections evolved and the works were reinvented in function of the cultural, social and political projects” of those in power.
But with its rich history, the ultimate objective is to let the museum speak for itself, he said.
“I believe that the best contribution I can make,” Verde added, “is that whoever enters will have the impression that the Uffizi has always been like this.”
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