A golden portal that still houses, fully intact, the last golden civilisation on earth and the birth place of the renaissance.

The Medici patronage of the arts here, beginning with Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent, nurtured some of the world’s greatest names in art: Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo.

Poetry, architecture, science, politics. All were infused with an appreciation of beauty by the Florentines. Today their faces and work can be seen gazing from the walls of the Uffizi, the Medici Palaces, the Palazzo Vecchio and throughout the architecture and streets of this ancient city symbolised by the Fleur de Lis.