On my first full day in Florence, I purchased a Friends of the Uffizi membership for 60€. This membership card allows me unlimited visits to the Uffizi Gallery and other Florentine museums for the rest of the calendar year. As such, I did not need to take in the hundreds of works all at once.
Today, I spent time getting a sense of the overall layout of the Gallery. The Uffizi is one of the world’s great museums, ranked with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris.
The Uffizi is located in the heart of Florence’s city center, right on the north bank of the Arno River. The muesum is very large, but smaller and more manageable than the Met or the Louvre. It has almost no art past 1800 so one can concentrate on Renaissance and Early Modern work. Plus a host of sculptures from the Ancient Greek and Roman periods.
The Uffizi is appropriately shaped like a U, with the bottom parallel to the Arno. The order is largely chronological, not divided by region or school. There are two floors of artwork, and visitors are guided from start to end in a single flow, like a Piggly Wiggly or IKEA.
I look forward to visiting the Uffizi many times over the next week.