Florence - Piazza Pitti

Bianca Cappello was the daughter of a noble Venetian family and the sweetheart and later wife of Grand Duke Francesco I. Her house, which was completely rebuilt by Bernardo Buontalenti in 1567, is a fine example of the mansions lived in by the nobility of that time. It has an unusual feature in the grotesque representations of bats below the windows.

The Zoological Museum is in the Palazzo Torrigiani, also known as "La Specola", the observatory, because Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo built an astronomical and meteorological observatory here in 1775. The museum's collection of anatomical specimens in wax is particularly interesting. Many of them were molded, in an improbably true-to-life fashion, in the studio of Clemente Susini (1754-1814).