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The Caccini Garden, off borgo Pinti, was one of the most beautiful and exotic gardens in Florence at the end of the 16th century.
The Bank of Italy in Florence is an imposing Neo Renaissance-style building along via dell'Oriuolo that dates to between 1865 and 1869.
After ten troubled years, the magnificent—although at the time controversial—cast iron and glass construction of the Vittorio Emanuele II gallery, which linked the city’s cathedral to the Scala theatre in ...
Most major Italian cities and many smaller ones boast statues to Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of the newly united Italy who reigned between 1861 and 1878. The most ...
The basilica of San Miniato al Monte recently celebrated its 1,000th birthday. Dominating the view from one of the highest and most scenic spots overlooking Florence, it is a jewel ...
Seven gates remain as reminders of the third circular wall built between 1284 and 1333 that once surrounded and defended the city of Florence: the Porta al Prato, Porta San ...
Two statues stand facing each other across piazza Indipendenza. One depicts Ubaldino Peruzzi de’ Medici, the first mayor of Florence and a minister in the newly proclaimed united Italy, and ...
Every year, thousands of people from all over the world visit piazzale Michelangelo to take photographs of the spectacular view it gives of the bridges over the Arno river and ...
When Michelangelo died in Rome at the venerable age of 88, the first priority was to bring his body back to Florence for appropriate burial and commemoration. This eventually took ...
On September 15, 1861, the king of the newly unified Italy Vittorio Emanuele II inaugurated the first Italian National Exhibition of Agricultural and Industrial Products and Fine Arts in Florence ...
In the middle of town there is a hospital that has been caring for tourists and residents over the last 700 years, never missing a single day, even during plagues, revolutions, wars or natural disasters.
For several months between the end of 2016 and early 2017, the fountain on the outer edge of piazza Santa Croce bordering via dei Benci, opposite Palazzo Cocchi-Serristori, was hidden ...
Massimo Ricci was born into a deeply Florentine family, his ancestry going back centuries. The family name can be found on the base of the cathedral, where all the church’s ...
In his ‘Divine Comedy’, Dante described the building as “my beautiful San Giovanni,” yet he was not the only famous Florentine to be baptised here.
If there is an incongruous monument anywhere in Florence, it is the grandiose and cloyingly ornate neoclassic arch that stands not quite in the middle of piazza della Libertà. Based ...
The clock above the main door inside the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, or the Duomo, as it is better known in Florence, is the only one of its ...
According to John Mason Neale’s Christmas hymn of 1853, when the good King Wenceslas rushed out with his servant to assist a poor man gathering fuel in the freezing winter weather, it was on the Feast of Stephen. In many continental European countries, including Italy, this holy figure
There are few places in the world where you can drive, ride your bike or walk through what was once the sixteenth-century portal of a grand basilica, but you can in Florence. Coming on foot from the city centre, on nearing the end of borgo degli Albizi, you arrive
Tucked away in the heart of Florence, in the area once known as the Campuccio, running from via del Campuccio and piazza Tasso to via dei Serragli, is a wall that incorporates the remnants of the fortifications built by Cosimo I in 1544 to defend Florence against attack from Siena.
As cars, buses and motorbikes hurtle by in via San Agostino, a white marble monument seems defenceless as it stands precariously on the southern tip of Florence’s piazza Santo Spirito. ...
In a square not far from the church of Santa Maria Novella, at the junction of via del Moro, via delle Belle Donne and via del Trebbio, stands the Croce al Trebbio column, one of two columns in the city that commemorate the triumphs of a Dominican friar, Peter of
Chariot racing conjures up images, at least for me, of ancient Rome and, in particular, of Ben Hur, the Oscar-winning film in which the hero, played by Charlton Heston, drove his chariot and team of four white horses full pelt around the Circus Maximus. So it was quite a
On August 10, 2013, the local press photographed Florence’s mayor, Matteo Renzi, sitting on a bulldozer in the Cascine park, ready to help demolish the burned-out shell of the former nightclub Meccanò. In doing so, he declared that it was the city’s intention to
