Pitti Palace

The Pitti Palace dominates the low valley near the Arno River with its bulging, rusticated stonework, lending the building an air of unyielding authority. Its exterior is further accentuated by a powerful repetition of shuttered windows and arch-topped apertures. Unlike traditional formal palaces situated on high ground, the Pitti Palace sits in a low valley, meaning that people in the Boboli Gardens look downhill at the palace, a view one architect described as appearing to have been built by nature herself, as if massive stones in a landslide had tumbled down the long escarpment and landed in an elegant, barricade-like pile at the bottom. Despite its less defensible position in the low ground, the solid stone structure of the Pitti Palace was so imposing that Napoleon once used it as a power base while in Florence.

Events at the Palace

Langdon and Sienna, having fled through the Boboli Gardens, reach the rear of the palace and slow to a calm walk, mixing inconspicuously with the first tourists of the day. Moving against the tide, they descend a narrow tunnel into the cortile, an inner courtyard where visitors are seated enjoying a morning espresso in the palace's makeshift café. The smell of fresh-ground coffee fills the air, and Langdon feels a sudden longing to sit down and enjoy a civilized breakfast, but they press on, entering the wide stone passageway that leads toward the palace's main doors. As they near the doorway, they collide with a growing bottleneck of stalled tourists who seem to be assembling in the portico to observe something outside. Peering through the crowd to the area in front of the palace, they see the Pitti's grand entrance, which is as blunt and unwelcoming as Langdon recalls it: rather than a manicured lawn and landscaping, the front yard is a vast expanse of pavement that stretches across an entire hillside, flowing down to the Via dei Guicciardini like a massive paved ski slope. At the bottom of the hill, a half-dozen police cars have streamed in from all directions, and a small army of officers are advancing up the hill, unholstering their weapons and fanning out to secure the front of the palace.

Escape and the Grotto

As the police enter the Pitti Palace, Sienna and Langdon retrace their steps through the interior, hurrying through the cortile and past the café, where a buzz is spreading as tourists rubberneck to locate the source of the commotion. They find the same narrow tunnel through which they descended from the gardens and plunge back into the passageway, bounding up the stairs. The end of the staircase banks left along a high retaining wall, and as they dash along it, the wall grows shorter beside them until they can see over it into the vast expanse of the Boboli Gardens. Langdon instantly grabs Sienna's arm and yanks her backward, ducking out of sight behind the retaining wall, as three hundred yards away, on the slope above the amphitheater, a phalanx of police descends, searching groves, interviewing tourists, and coordinating with one another on handheld radios. Sienna realizes they are trapped, with the police blocking the front and the gardens being swept behind them. Langdon, however, suddenly turns and looks east, recalling that the Vatican has a similar walled-city structure, and declares there might be a different way out. He leads her to a dead-end cul-de-sac whose walls are twice as high as the others, terminating at the mouth of a gaping cavern—the Buontalenti Grotto—with daggerlike stalactites looming over its entrance. Langdon rushes to a small gray door to the left of the cavern, but it has no handle and can be opened only from within. The piercing whine of a surveillance drone echoes off the high walls around them, and they duck out of sight beneath the grotto's stalactite overhang, finding themselves in a dim chamber that reminds Sienna of something out of Botticelli's Mappa dell'Inferno.