This beautiful, but unfinished, palace was begun by a son of Pandolfo Pandolfini, who went to Naples in 1465 as ambassador of the Florentine Republic. He was so popular there, and became such a favourite with the King, that his son Gianozzo, described as a “jocund and liberal man, honoured by all who knew him,” was made Bishop of Troia. When the Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici became Pope he summoned Gianozzo Pandolfini to Rome, and created him Governor of Castel Sant’Angelo. But Florence was the place he loved, and he often came to stay in a house he had hired in the Via S. Gallo from the monks of Monte Senario. After improving the house, and turning part of the orchard into a garden, he wanted to buy it, but the monks refused to sell, alleging that in the orchard stood an oratory, or small church, which had once formed part of a convent of Benedictine nuns. Leo X. came to the aid of his friend the Bishop, and by a Papal Bull, dated 28th May, 1517, followed by a Brieve in Feb. 1520, conceded to him, and approved of the sale to him, of the house, land and church, allowing him to suppress and transfer the latter elsewhere if it so pleased him. The Pope at the same time sent some fine marbles from Rome to be used in the decoration of the house. Thereupon Bishop Pandolfini addressed himself to his “most dear friend Raffaello da Urbino,” who, as Vasari tells us, “made for him a design for the palace he wished to build in Via S. Gallo, and Giovanfrancesco da San Gallo was sent from Rome to begin the work, which he did with all possible diligence.”

Bishop Gianozzo died in 1525, so Vasari is in error when he states that the building, which had been interrupted by the death of the architect and the siege of Florence in 1530, was continued by him, with Bastiano da San Gallo, surnamed Aristotle, as his architect. It was most probably Ferrando Pandolfini, a man of considerable learning, to whom his uncle ceded his bishopric of Troia, and to whom he also left the palace, who went on with it, and who caused the inscription to be placed under the cornice, JANNOCTIUS. PANDOLFINIUS. EPS. TROIANUS. LEONIS. X. ET. CLEMENTIS. VII. PONT. MAX. BENEFICIIS. AUCTUS. A. FUNDAMENTIS. EREXIT. AN. SAL. M. D. XX. The original design by Raphael is said to have been curtailed, so that the part which now consists of ground-floor rooms, covered by a large terrace, ought to have formed an integral portion of the edifice. But the building is so beautiful as it stands that one can hardly regret what was left undone.

The entrance door, the windows, especially those of the first floor, which are Ionic, while the lower ones are Doric, and the capitals of the columns surrounding the loggia, are very fine. In 1616 the palace passed to a descendant of Bishop Gianozzo’s third brother, who finished it and laid out the garden, which had been neglected. He also dowered the oratory of S. Silvestro which had been incorporated with the house and not transferred. Roberto Pandolfini, his nephew, inherited the palace in 1655, and it is still in the possession of descendants of the family. Count Alessio Pandolfini restored it in excellent taste in 1875, when the outer door of the small church, or oratory, was made into a window. Florence owes to Battista, another brother of Bishop Gianozzo Pandolfini, the fine doorway of the Badia, which he commissioned Benedetto da Rovezzano to build, and he also erected the tomb to his grandfather, another Gianozzo Pandolfini, in the same church.