The youngest of Florence’s great Renaissance private palaces and one of the finest examples of domestic architecture of the period anywhere. The rich merchant Filippo Strozzi commissioned Benedetto da Maiano to build it: when the patron symbolically laid the first stone of his new residence on 6 August 1489, the Palazzo Medici (which this building drew upon for inspiration) had been standing for over thirty years. Today it houses a number of cultural institutions.