Casa Buonarroti: Michelangelo the Poet
Why is it significant?
On the corner of Via Ghibellina and Via Michelangelo Buonarroti stands a dignified palazzo with tall windows and a sober doorway. It looks like the house of any well-off Florentine family, and in a way it is: the family was called Buonarroti.
Key Facts
| Place | Casa Buonarroti: Michelangelo the Poet |
|---|---|
| Address | Via Ghibellina 70, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.76990, 11.26360 |
| Part of Walk | Dante's Florence: Beatrice, Exile and the Empty Tomb of Santa Croce |
| Generated | Generated |
On the corner of Via Ghibellina and Via Michelangelo Buonarroti stands a dignified palazzo with tall windows and a sober doorway. It looks like the house of any well-off Florentine family, and in a way it is: the family was called Buonarroti.
Michelangelo bought property here in 1508, but he spent most of his life in Rome and hardly lived in it. It was his nephew Leonardo who built the palace, and his great-nephew, also called Michelangelo, a poet and playwright, who turned it into a monument to his great-uncle, filling its rooms with paintings celebrating his life. The last of the family left it to the city, and it opened as a museum in 1859.
Inside are two marble reliefs carved by a boy of about sixteen, around 1490 to 1492, while he was learning in the Medici sculpture garden. One is a tender Madonna sitting on a staircase. The other is a furious tangle of bodies, the Battle of the Centaurs. In those two slabs you can already see the whole of Michelangelo: the stillness and the storm.
But this walk is about words, and Michelangelo was also a poet, author of around three hundred poems. He worshipped Dante. In one sonnet he writes that he would gladly trade the greatest fortune in the world for Dante's bitter exile, if only he could have his genius too. And in 1519, when Florentines petitioned Pope Leo the Tenth to bring Dante's bones home from Ravenna, Michelangelo added his own line, offering to make the poet a worthy tomb. His great-nephew later published his poems, in 1623, but tidied them up, changing some love poems addressed to a young man so that they seemed to be written to a woman. Readers had to wait centuries for the real text.
The bones never came. We will see why at the end of this walk, in front of a tomb that is empty. For now, head south-east through the quiet back streets to Via di San Giuseppe, where a short, straight street begins with a little shrine on its corner.