Uffizi Florence, the cafes in Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Gardens will open

Judicial victory of the Uffizi Galleries at the TAR of Tuscany: the cafeterias of the Boboli Gardens and Palazzo Pitti, the new refreshment points of the palace and the recently restored Kaffeehaus in the Medici garden, will soon be able to open. The administrative magistrates rejected the appeal filed by Opera Laboratori against the award of restaurant services in Palazzo Pitti and in the Boboli Gardens to the Scudieri International group. In the related tender, Opera Laboratori had finished second behind Scudieri; she had therefore turned to the Tar, which had “frozen” the procedure pending judgment.

But the sentence that has just been issued contains a total rejection: “the groundlessness of all the complaints proposed allows the main appeal and the subsequent additional reasons to be rejected”, in fact, write the judges of the TAR. Now that the situation has been unblocked, the Galleries will immediately complete the contractual process with the new concessionaire: within a few weeks the new cafés of Palazzo Pitti and the Boboli Kaffeehaus will be ready to open their doors to visitors.

That of the catering at Pitti and Boboli is the sixth in a series of European tenders for services managed independently and successfully concluded by the Galleries in the last two years: four of these tenders were assigned without giving rise to any dispute; the only other appeal had concerned the tender for the care and maintenance of the greenery in Boboli, but in that case too the administrative judges had rejected it, agreeing with the Uffizi. “Finally, soon we will be able to offer visitors to the Boboli Gardens cool drinks during the summer, hot chocolates during the winter months and all year round Tuscan specialties and, as regards the Kaffehaus, also Austrian specialties – comments the director of the Uffizi Galleries Eike Schmidt – making the stay in our open-air museum even more pleasant and satisfying».