Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Reale
Renaissance riverfront palace built around a surviving eleventh-century tower, now holding Medici and Lorraine portraits, armor and tapestries.
This guide to the Museo Nazionale di Palazzo Reale in Pisa opens with an odd decision: when Grand Duke Francesco I de' Medici ordered a new palace built here in fifteen eighty-three, his architect Bernardo Buontalenti chose not to clear the plot, but to build around an eleventh-century tower once owned by the Gaetani family. It follows the seams that decision left behind, from a dark verrucano archway trusted by medieval builders to a loggia whose columns predate everything around them. Look closely at the courtyard stonework, where centuries of masonry sit stitched into a single facade.
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