For nearly 30 years, the block between piazza Ghiberti, via dell’Agnolo and via Ferdinando Paolieri in the heart of Florence’s Santa Croce quarter has been the site of a major centre of style and design: the architecture faculty of the University of Florence. Long known as a training ground for famous Italian architects and designers, among them Renzo Piano, in 1986 the faculty moved to the current site—the former convent of Santa Verdiana—which the university had purchased and renovated. A new, modern doorway facing the back of the market of Sant’Ambrogio, once the convent’s vegetable and herb garden, is now the entrance to a building whose history for more than a century had little to do with creativity. In fact, quite the opposite.
The convent was founded in 1395 by the notary Niccolò Manetto di Buonagiunta for nuns of the Vallombrosan order from his hometown, about 30 km from Florence. After a five-year restoration of the existing building and construction of a church, the first nuns arrived. In 1402, the convent was placed under the protection of the Republic of Florence, and in 1425, a second phase of construction began, financed by the nuns’ dowries and income from the land the notary had left in his will. Because the Medici were related to Piera di Bivigliano, who was the abbess of the convent from 1451, it is sometimes said a third building phase, in 1462, was financed by Cosimo the Elder, but it was probably his son, Giovanni de’ Medici, prior of Florence, who paid the expenses of enlarging the convent, surrounding the garden with a wall and building the cloister, with its arches supported by octagonal pillars decorated with acanthus leaves. The Medici stem on the wall in via dell’Agnolo marks the occasion.
The convent was first named for both San Giovanni Gualberto (995–1073) and Santa Verdiana (1182–1242), but over time only Santa Verdiana’s name remained. Santa Verdiana was born in Castelfiorentino to a noble but impoverished family. At age 12, she demonstrated her commitment to charity by donating the contents of a warehouse—stocked full of her uncle’s beans—to the poor. Miraculously, after she prayed all night, when the family awoke the warehouse had been fully restocked. Returning home from a pilgrimage to Rome, she asked to be walled up as an anchorite in a small cell near St. Anthony’s oratory. She lived there for the next 34 years, her only contact with the outside world a small window through which she received communion, ate her meagre daily meal and spoke to occasional visitors. Sometime during her last years, two snakes slithered into her cell, often biting her, but she never revealed their presence. According to local tradition, when she died in February 1242, all the bells of Castelfiorentino began to toll unexpectedly without anybody ringing them.
Three centuries of uneventful life passed at the convent until, in 1807, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was annexed to France following Napoleon’s victories. In accordance with the emperor’s wishes to curtail the power of the Catholic Church, in 1808, Santa Verdiana, along with 65 other religious institutions in Florence, were suppressed and their property confiscated. The pending conversion of the convent into what would have been the city’s abattoirs was avoided, however, as the French left Italy after Napoleon’s abdication in April 1814.
In 1865, following the closure of ‘le Stinche,’ the city’s old jail situated on the site now occupied by Teatro Verdi, the government was authorised to take possession of the convent for temporary use as a women’s prison. The convent was therefore finally closed and significant modifications were made to its internal spaces. What was meant only to be temporary accommodation for the inmates, however, soon became permanent.
Among the early inmates was Russian revolutionary and co-founder of the Italian Socialist Party, Anna Kuliscioff (1855–1925), who contracted tuberculosis whilst incarcerated there.
Sixty years later, during World War II, other political prisoners and partisans passed through the gates of Santa Verdiana, many of whom were then transferred to Villa Triste, on via Bolognese, where they were tortured and even killed. For fear they would ‘indoctrinate’ the others, political detainees were kept segregated away from the Jewish internees and ordinary inmates. When, on July 9, 1944, a group of 12 partisans dressed as German soldiers conned their way into Santa Verdiana to free a companion, the mother superior of the nuns of Saint Joseph of the Apparition, who worked in the prison, made them free another 16 political prisoners, fearing that those women be executed in reprisal. Jewish female prisoners were frequently deported, and in January 1944, scientist Enrica Calabresi, terrified she would be sent to Auschwitz, poisoned herself.
When the new prison at Sollicciano was completed in 1983, the inmates of Santa Verdiana were transferred there, and the convent, sold to the university, was once again transformed.
Between Florence and Pisa, Castelfiorentino, part of the province of Florence, is home to a small museum devoted to Santa Verdiana. Opened in 1999, it is next to the town’s shrine of Santa Verdiana. For more information about the museum, see theflr.net/1zh72h.
