Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  9. The best work in the Medici Gallery in the PALAZZO MEDICI-RICCARDI is a Virgin and Child by Filippo Lippi. The fresco of the apotheosis of the Medici is by Luca Giordano.

  10. The Galleria Corsini, No. 11 Via Parione, is the best private art collection in Florence. It was largely formed by Marchese Bartolommeo Corsini and his son, Filippo, in the seventeenth century. As well as the frescoes by Gabbiani there are works by, amongst others, Maratta, Luca Giordano, Giovanni Bellini, Pontormo, Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio and Sustermans.

  11. The frescoes in the dome at San Frediano in Cestello are by Gabbiani.

  12. Ignazio Hugford's Tobias Visiting His Father is in Santa Felicita, the ancient church off the Via Guicciardini rebuilt by Ferdinando Ruggieri in the 1730s. His Death of St Andrea Avellina is in San Gaetano (the seventeenth-century church in Via Tornabuoni with a façade by Gherardo Silvani) and his altarpiece of the Annunciation in San Jacopo sopr'Arno, Borgo San Jacopo, whose Baroque interior was painted at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The rare thirteenth-century portico here was removed in 1529 from the now demolished church of San Donato a Scopeto which once stood beyond the PORTA ROMANA. There is also a painting by Hugford in San Paolino, in Via Palazzuolo, a tenth-century foundation rebuilt in 1669. Over three thousand items from his collections were purchased by the Uffizi from his executor.

  13. The Cascine, the long, narrow, unenclosed park beyond the PORTA AL PRATO, was opened to the public by the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo. For generations the land had belonged to the Medici, who had farms and hunted here. (Cascina means dairy farm.) Shelley conceived his ‘Ode to the West Wind’ in the park. The Monumento dell'Indiano at the western end was erected in memory of the Maharaja of Kolhapur who died in Florence in 1870. There are two racecourses here as well as sports grounds, tennis-courts and a swimming-pool.

  14. Lions, heraldic symbols of the city, had been kept in Florence since the thirteenth century, at first in a cage opposite the BAPTISTERY, then in pens near the PALAZZO DELLA SIGNORIA, where the smell of them proved too offensive for Cosimo I, who had them removed. The Via dei Leoni commemorates their presence here.

  15. Palazzo Corsini sul Prato was designed by Buontalenti in the 1590s and completed and enlarged in the 1620s for the Corsini family, who still live here. There are two other Florentine palazzi bearing the same name: the immense Baroque Palazzo Corsini on the Lungarno Corsini (which was built over a period of eighty years from the 1640s to the designs of a variety of architects including Ferdinando Tacca, Pier Francesco Silvani and Antonio Ferri) and Palazzo Corsini, No. 6 Borgo Santa Croce, an early-sixteenth-century building now occupied by the Istituto Araldico.

  16. Palazzo di San Clemente is at No. 15 Via Gino Capponi on the corner of Via Micheli. It is now partially used by the university and awaits restoration. There is no indication that the Young Pretender lived here. The large Palazzo Capponi opposite was built in 1698–1713 by Carlo Fontana.

  CHAPTER 19 (pages 220–25)

  1. The Biblioteca Riccardiana, No. 14 Via de' Ginori, is in the seventeenth-century extension of the PALAZZO MEDICI-RICCARDI. It was founded by Riccardo Riccardi at the beginning of the seventeenth century, opened to the public in 1718 and sold to the Commune in 1812. The reading-room has frescoes by Luca Giordano. The library contains the Villani chronicles of Florence, a copy of Dante's Divina Commedia with notes by Cristoforo Landino, and the books of the Peruzzi bank. At the time of writing the library was ‘temporarily’ closed.

  2. Antonio Magliabechi, Cosimo III's librarian, a clever, sardonic little hunchback, assembled an immense collection of codices and manuscripts which are now in the Biblioteca Nazionale. He was said to have been able to recall every word in almost every line he had ever read. He lived in an airless, unswept house opposite Santa Maria Novella where visitors, so Eric Cochrane wrote, ‘had to avoid tripping over the disorderly pile of books that filled every corner of every room, slipping on the breadcrusts and apple peels scattered about the floor, sitting on the “miserable bed” littered with paper and garbage, and looking at the deformed face, frozen between a smile and a sneer, which nature had given the proprietor in order “to make the beauty of his intellect shine forth more clearly”. They also had to suffer the stench of clothes never washed and never taken off.’ The Biblioteca Magliabechiana was first opened to the public in 1747.

  The Biblioteca Nazionale overlooks the Arno next to SANTA CROCE. The main building was begun in 1911. As well as those of Magliabechi, the collections include the Biblioteca Palatina-Medicea and the library of the Grand Duke Ferdinando III. Stored here are some three hundred volumes of Galileo's papers and the letters of numerous great Florentines, including Michelangelo and Machiavelli.

  3. The Archivio di Stato, founded in 1582 and containing archives from before the days of Bishop Hildebrand, has been housed since 1989 in the new building on the south side of Piazza Beccaria.

  4. The former Accademia Fiorentina had been founded in 1541 by the Grand Duke Cosimo I. The new academy was established in 1784.

  5. The Accademia di Belle Arti was founded by the Grand Duke in 1765. Its loggia, the Loggia dell'Ospedale di San Matteo, is one of the oldest in Florence. The lunettes over the doors are by the Della Robbia. The adjoining building is the Galleria dell'Accademia, No. 60 Via Ricasoli. It contains works brought here for study by students at the Accademia. Among the paintings are works by Filippino Lippi, Taddeo Gaddi, Perugino, Baldovinetti, Fra Bartolommeo, Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, Bronzino, Pontormo and Andrea Orcagna. The gallery's most prized exhibits are MICHELANGELO'S DAVID, the slaves from his unfinished tomb for Pope Julius II in Rome and his St Matthew from the DUOMO.

  6. The Sala della Niobe is Room 42 of the UFFIZI. It was designed by Gaspare Maria Paoletti. The frescoes are by Tommaso Gherardini. Among the antiquities exhibited here is the Medici Vase, which was acquired by Lorenzo de' Medici. The group, Niobe and Her Children, was found in a vineyard near the Lateran and brought here from the Villa Medici in 1775.

  7. La Specola, No. 17 Via Romana, takes its name from the astronomical observatory which was established here in the Palazzo Torrigiani by the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo and was visited by Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday in 1814. The exhibits in the Museo Zoologico include a collection of anatomical models in wax by Clemente Sisini made between 1775 and 1814. The Palazzo Torrigiani at No. 1 Via delle Terme was formerly the PALAZZO BARTOLINI-SALIMBENI. The façade (c. 1530) of Palazzo Buondelmonti opposite is also attributed to Baccio d'Agnolo. It was here in 1819 that the Swiss bibliophile, Gian Pietro Vieusseux, founded his literary and scientific association (now in the PALAZZO STROZZI). There is another Palazzo Torrigiani, a sixteenth-century building, on the Lungarno Torrigiani. The Giardino Torrigiani west of the Via de' Serragli between the Pitti Palace and Bellosguardo was created by Pietro Torrigiani in the early nineteenth century. It is the largest private garden in Florence.

  8. The small Palazzina Livia in PIAZZA SAN MARCO was designed by Bernardo Fallani. The drawing-room was painted in blue and white trompe-l'oeil on the Grand Duke's orders.

  9. Palazzo Serristori, on the Lungarno Serristori, was built at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The façade overlooking the Arno opposite the BIBLIOTECA NAZIONALE was added in 1873. It is now the headquarters of the Soprintendenza Archeologica della Toscana. Palazzo Serristori of c. 1475, also known as Palazzo Cocchi, No. 1 PIAZZA SANTA CROCE, formerly attributed to Baccio d'Agnolo, is now believed to be by Giuliano da Sangallo.

  10. The Ghetto was created in 1571 on the orders of Cosimo I. It extended northwards from the middle of the present PIAZZA DELLA REPUBBLICA to Via dei Pecori and westwards from the Via Roma to the Via Brunelleschi. Architectural fragments from the Ghetto, which was demolished in the nineteenth century, can now be seen in the Museo di Firenze Antica, which is approached from the Chiostro delle Spese at SAN MARCO. The Ghetto could be entered only by way of two narrow entrances on the north and south sides. The large synagogue in Via Farini was built in 1874�
�82 to the designs of Mariano Falcini, Vincenzo Michele and Marco Treves.

  CHAPTER 20 (pages 226–36)

  1. The Kaffeehaus below the FORTE DI BELVEDERE is still a café, open in the summer.

  2. The Palazzina della Meridiana was begun in 1776 by Gaspare Maria Paoletti. At the east end of the PITTI PALACE, it was opened in 1983 as the Galleria del Costume. The Collezione Contini-Bonacossi, including works by Veronese, Bernini, Tintoretto, Goya, Velasquez and El Greco, is on the upper floor.

  3. Palazzo Masetti (Castelbarco), No. 2 Lungarno Corsini, is now the British Consulate. The Palazzo Gianfigliazzi, next door at No. 4, a reconstructed fifteenth-century building, was a hotel in the early nineteenth century. Alessandro Manzoni stayed here in 1827; and Louis Bonaparte, who had been made King of Holland by his brother, died here, a querulous old man confined to a wheelchair, in 1846. The palace now houses the Ristorante Corsini as well as the Pensione Bretagna and three shops.

  4. Frederick Stibbert was born in Florence in 1838. His mother was Italian, his father English. Artist and traveller, he fought under Garibaldi in 1866. He was extremely rich and formed an extraordinarily diverse collection of paintings, furniture, porcelain, cassoni, tapestries, firearms, malachite and glass. His splendid collection of armour includes that of Giovanni delle Bande Nere and some of the best examples of Japanese armour to be found anywhere in the world. The costumes include the clothes worn by Napoleon during his coronation as King of Italy in 1805. To house his treasures, Stibbert built a huge villa beyond the PORTA SAN GALLO designed for him by Cesare Fortini. On his death in 1906 he bequeathed it to the British government, who made it over to Florence. The entrance to the Museo Stibbert is at No. 26 Via Frederico Stibbert. The large park is also open to the public. It adjoins the park of the VILLA FABBRICOTTI.

  5. Canova's monument to Alfieri, completed in 1810, is in the south aisle of SANta croce, facing the pulpit by Benedetto da Maiano by the nave pillar. There were delays in its erection because the friars were uneasy about Alfieri's relationship with the Countess of Albany.

  6. Ugo Foscolo's sepulchral statue by Antonio Berti (1939) is at the eastern end of the south aisle of SANTA CROCE next to Cigoli's Entry into Jerusalem on the sixth altar, on the other side of which are Giuseppe Cassioli's monument to Rossini and Bernardo Rossellino's tomb of Leonardo Bruni of c. 1446.

  7. The monument to the Countess of Albany by Emilio Santarelli is in the Castellani Chapel at SANTA CROCE, which has frescoes by followers of Agnolo Gaddi and terracotta statues of saints by the Della Robbia.

  CHAPTER 21 (pages 237–49)

  1. The Palazzo Borghese, No. 110 VIA GHIELLINA, was built (1821–2) on the site of a palace belonging to the Salviati family for Pauline Bonaparte' husband, Camillo Borghese. It took less than a year to complete. The neoclassical façade, with its heavily rusticated ground floor, was designed by Gaetano Baccani.

  2. The neoclassical façade (1814–23) of the Villa of Poggio Imperiale is by Pasquale Poccianti and Giuseppe Cacialli.

  3. Shelley took ‘pleasant apartments for six months' in 1819 at Palazzo Marino in the Via Valfonda, where what is left of the once large and celebrated Gualfonda garden, laid out at the beginning of the sixteenth century, can still be seen. Shelley's ‘Ode to the West Wind' was written in Florence at this time; and his son, Percy Florence Shelley, who succeeded to the baronetcy, was born here.

  4. Since 1879 the Museo Archeologico has been housed in the Palazzo della Crocetta, which was built in the 1620s for the Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena, probably to the designs of Giulio Parigi. It contains one of the world's best collections of Etruscan antiquities. The Etruscan Topographical Museum on the ground floor was established by Luigi Adriano Milani in 1897, the Egyptian Museum and the Etrusco-Greco-Roman Museum on the upper floors after an expedition to Egypt directed by Françoiois Champollion and Ippolito Rosellini in 1828–9. Among the exhibits are the Etruscan Chimera discovered in Arezzo and brought to Florence by Vasari; a bronze of an orator, the Arringatore, of the third century BC; the Greek Idolino of the fifth century BC; a Hittite chariot in wood and bone from a Theban tomb; and the Attic François Vase acquired by the Grand Duke Leopoldo II in 1845.

  Other museums in Florence not mentioned in the text are:

  The Museo di Firenze com'era, Via dell' Oriuolo. In the former Convento delle Oblate, this is a topographical and historical museum. It contains maps, engravings, photographs and views of Florence by, amongst others, Thomas Patch, Giuseppe Maria Terreni and Giuseppe Zocchi, as well as a series of lunettes of Medici villas by Giusto Utens.

  The Museo Horne, established by Herbert Percy Horne, an English art historian and author of a pioneering monograph on Botticelli – who died in 1916. His collection of painting, sculpture, fur-niture, medals, coins, ceramics and miscellaneous works of art is housed in the Palazzo Corsi, No. 6 Via de' Benci, which has been attributed to Simone del Pollaiuolo, II Cronaca. Artists whose works can be seen here include Jacopo Sansovino, Filippino Lippi, Lorenzo di Credi, Dosso Dossi, Bernardo Daddi, Benozzo Gozzoli, Giambologna and Ammannati. The St Stephen, part of a polyptych, is by Giotto, the tondo of the Holy Family by Beccafumi.

  The Museo Nazionale di Antropologia ed Etnología on the corner of Via del Proconsolo and Borgo degli Albizzi. Containing exhibits from Asia, Africa, South America and Mexico, it was founded in 1869 by Paolo Mantegazza and is housed in Palazzo Nonfinito which, begun by Buontalenti in 1593, was continued by Vincenzo Scamozzi, G. B. Caccini and Dionigi Nigetti. As its name suggests it was never finished. The courtyard is by Ludovico Cardi da Cigoli, and the stairway by Santi di Tito.

  The Museo Fiorentino di Preistoria, No. 21 Via Sant'Egidio, founded in 1946.

  5. Doney's, founded by Gasparo Doney in the 1820s, remained one of Florence's most popular cafés and pastry-shops for generations. Stendhal, the Brownings, the brothers Goncourt, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Jessie White Mario were all more or less regular customers. Théophile Gautier praised it highly in his Voyage en Italie (1851). It was still a favourite rendezvous in the 1980s, but has now closed. The Gambrinus still survives, however, in Via Brunelleschi. It was at the old Gambrinus that André Gide met Gabriele D'Annunzio and watched him indulging ‘with obvious greediness in little vanilla ices served in small cardboard boxes’.

  CHAPTER 22 (pages 250–59)

  1. The Villa della Petraia was bought by the Medici from the widow of Filippo Salutati in 1595 and rebuilt by Buontalenti. The fountain of Venus Drying Her Hair in the garden is by Giambologna. The courtyard is decorated with frescoes celebrating the history of the Medici family by Baldassare Franceschini, Il Volterrano, who painted them for the Grand Duke Ferdinando I's son, Lorenzo de' Medici. The villa was given to the state by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1919.

  2. One of the largest of the city's squares, the Piazza d'Azeglio, with its fine plane trees, is at the far end of the Via della Colonna.

  3. The construction of the Piazza della Repubblica, formerly known as the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries entailed the demolition of several medieval buildings as well as the MERCATO VECCHIO and much of the GHETTO. The granite Roman Colonna dell'Abbondanza was erected on its present site in 1428. The figure on the top of the column is a copy of the original by Giovanni Battista Foggini. Among much other work in Florence, Foggini was responsible for the fine Baroque interior of San Giorgio sulla Costa, the tribune and side chapels in SANT' AMBROGIO, and the huge marble statues of the Apostles and Evangelists in the church of SAN GAETANO. Talking to ‘elderly persons’ in 1911, E. V. Lucas discovered that nothing so distressed them as ‘the loss of the old quarter for making this new spacious piazza’. ‘And,’ he added, ‘nothing can so delight the younger Florentines as its possession, for having nothing to do in the evenings, they do it chiefly in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.’

  4. The botanical gardens to the north of the university, known as the Giardino dei Semplici, Via Micheli, are on the site of a bota
nical garden created for the Grand Duke Cosimo I by Niccoló Tribolo in 1545. In this area are the Botanical Museum, the Museum of Minerals and the Palaeontological Museum.

  5. The Giardino dell'Orticoltura was laid out in 1859. The greenhouse of 1880 is by Giacomo Roster.

  6. The Palazzo Guadagni is at No. 10 Piazza Santo Spirito. It was probably designed by Simone del Pollaiuolo, Il Cronaca, and built about 1505. The sgraffito work is by Andrea del Sarto; the wrought-iron lamps have been attributed to Niccolò Grosso. The façade with its loggia on the top floor shaded by wide eaves was much copied in sixteenth-century Florence. Built for Rinieri Dei, whose family commissioned the Madonna del Baldacchino for their chapel in the church of SANTO SPIRITO, it was left in 1683 to the Compagnia dei Buonuomini di San Martino, a charitable organization for poveri vergognosi, poor people too ashamed to beg (see also Chapter 5, note 1).

  7. The Castello di Vincigliata near Settignano was built in 1855–65 around an old early-eleventh-century tower.

  8. The Giubbe Rosse in PIAZZA DELLA REPUBBLICA is so called because the waiters used to wear red jackets.

  9. The Museo di Storia della Fotograffia Fratelli Alinari, which contains material illustrating the history of the firm, is in the PALAZZO RUCELLAI.

  CHAPTER 23 (pages 260–76)

  1. The Villino Trollope later became a pensione. Thomas Hardy stayed here in 1887, later moving to No. 1 Via del Podere.