Uffizi Director Eike Schmidt said Friday that the Florence museum was seventh-top in the world last year for visitor numbers despite the COVID-19 pandemic. "The pandemic hit extremely hard but the Uffizi Gallery hung in there," Schmidt told the Foreign Press Association of Italy.

"In 2020 we had a total of 1,206,175 visitors, 27.5% of the number of the previous year, despite COVID and all that it entailed in terms of closures and restrictions. "That puts us in seventh place among the art museums of the whole world.