The group of museums contained in the Pitti Palace were formed during five centuries of history. It is certainly the largest museum complex in the city (the building alone is 32.000 square metres in size) and perhaps can also be considered the most fascinating and complete of them all, partly for its size and partly for the wide variety of historical, artistic and naturalistic subjects that the curious visitor can find exhibited there.

Piazza Pitti marks the start of the visit to the palace. The square has recently been repaved on the same design as that used in the 18th century, with three stone-paved driveways up to the door (one straight up the centre of the square and the other two on either side), with the remaining space filled in with a chipped stone and cement mixture, that looks rather like gravel and whose warm colour enhances and blends in with the royal palace's facade. The square is dominated by the powerful elongated palace building, which Maria de' Medici, Queen of France (1573-1642), used as a model when she had the Luxembourg Palace built in Paris.

Filippo Brunelleschi designed the original square-shaped building in around 1440 for the merchant Luca Pitti; the Medici family bought it in 1550, during the reign of Cosimo I, and work immediately got under way on the enlargements under Bartolomeo Ammannati (he designed the extraordinary courtyard), followed by Giulio and Alfonso Parigi (who extended the facade to its present size between 1620 and 1640-50), and, under the Lorraines, architects Giuseppe Ruggeri, Gaspare Maria Paoletti and Pasquale Poccianti, who added the two lateral wings curving around the square (called Rondòs) and the Palazzina of the Meridiana.