Palazzo Vecchio

Rising over Piazza della Signoria with its 94-metre bell tower, the Palazzo Vecchio has been Florence's seat of civic power since 1322. In its Hall of the Five Hundred, Leonardo and Michelangelo were once commissioned to paint rival battle scenes—both left unfinished. The friar Girolamo Savonarola, who briefly ruled Florence as a puritanical theocracy and staged the 'Bonfire of the Vanities,' was arrested here, tortured, and on 23 May 1498 hanged and burned in the piazza below—a bronze plaque marks the exact spot. Later Cosimo I de' Medici turned it into a lavish ducal palace. A copy of Michelangelo's 'David' stands outside where the original was unveiled in 1504.