Palazzo
dei Priori

Used as the seat of the Priors and the General Council starting from the fifteenth century, with an adjacent tower built two centuries earlier, the building is spread over two superimposed floors of the same surface. A fine external stone staircase connects the two floors and at the end of which a spectacular panorama opens up. From the architecture common to many other Italian public buildings, the building consists of a loggia on the ground floor communicating with the city street, while on the upper floor there are the chapel and the hall where the assembly of the city magistrates took place. The exterior of the building is embellished with a particular late fifteenth-century frieze with a series of festive points made in graffiti, while the mighty Medici coat of arms stands out in the right corner. Inside there is a large hall with trusses, restored at the end of the nineteenth century by the architect Antonio Salvetti. In these spaces you can see the beautiful inlaid doors of the fifteenth century and the finely modeled coeval lunettes portraying Christ and the Madonna and Child. Next to the hall there is also the chancellery room and the chapel dedicated to San Giuseppe, renovated during the sixteenth century. On the ground floor there are rooms that have an independent access, in the modern age they were used as salt warehouses while more recently they were used as an exhibition space. After some restorations, the Palace housed the Civic and Sacred Art Museum, now moved to the new exhibition venue in San Pietro. Next to the building, under the vault of the staircase, there is a fourteenth-century source connected to the medieval aqueduct that allowed the building to be supplied with water.