The Uffizi Galleries in Florence have unveiled a €50 million renovation programme that will reshape the entire museum complex — the Uffizi Gallery, Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens — over the next two years (Florence Daily News).

The investment, announced on 6 August 2026, combines two streams of funding: ongoing interventions already in motion and new projects set to begin. According to the Uffizi's own announcement on 4 August, the work covers museographic reinstallations — the way art is arranged and interpreted for visitors — restorations of individual works and historic environments, new lighting systems, and what the museum calls "refunctionalization" of spaces that have long served purposes other than their original design (Uffizi Galleries).

Some changes are already visible. The museum has inaugurated 14 new rooms dedicated to Venetian and Florentine 16th-century masters, displaying 105 paintings across more than 1,100 square metres. About a third of those paintings had spent years in storage, unseen by the public (Italian Ministry of Culture). At Palazzo Pitti, across the River Arno, major restoration and reinstallation work on the first floor — the Galleria Palatina — has been under way since 2025, backed by an investment exceeding €1 million (Uffizi Galleries).

The programme also touches infrastructure that visitors rarely think about. A massive overhaul of the Boboli Gardens' entire sewage and drainage system has been in progress since at least 2024 (Italian Ministry of Culture). The Ammannati Courtyard, the grand Renaissance inner courtyard of Palazzo Pitti, has already been returned to the public after its own restoration (Uffizi Galleries).

Inside the Uffizi Gallery itself, the visitor experience is being physically rerouted. Entry will shift from the central doorway to a door on the right of the main façade, with separate entrances and exits designed to streamline the flow of foot traffic — and, the museum says, to improve conditions for security staff (Uffizi Galleries). Not every room will be reliably open during the works; the museum has warned that some spaces affected by restoration "cannot always be guaranteed" to visitors (Uffizi Galleries).

One notable discovery has already emerged from the scaffolding. During restoration of the Tribuna degli Uffizi — the octagonal room designed by Giorgio Vasari in the late 16th century to house the Medici family's most prized artworks — workers uncovered 18th-century decorations on the vaulted ceiling's inner surface (Italian Ministry of Culture). The find will inform the ongoing restoration of the room's architectural decoration.

The Museo della Moda e del Costume, housed in the Palazzina della Meridiana within Palazzo Pitti, has fully reopened with a new layout after four years of renovation (Uffizi Galleries).

For anyone planning a trip to Florence, the practical upshot is straightforward: the doors are staying open, but the experience is shifting under visitors' feet. Some rooms will be closed. Others will look entirely different. And over the next two years, a complex that drew nearly five million visitors before the pandemic will be both a museum and a building site, with the art still on the walls and the builders working around it.