Museo Horne: An English Poet's Renaissance House
Why is it significant?
On the corner of Via de' Benci stands a small palazzo of almost perfect proportions: rough-cut stone on the ground floor, elegant arched windows above, a cornice like the brim of a hat. It was built at the end of the fifteenth century, and it looks as if nobody has touched it since.
Key Facts
| Place | Museo Horne: An English Poet's Renaissance House |
|---|---|
| Address | Via de' Benci 6, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.76750, 11.25950 |
| Part of Walk | Dante's Florence: Beatrice, Exile and the Empty Tomb of Santa Croce |
| Generated | Generated |
On the corner of Via de' Benci stands a small palazzo of almost perfect proportions: rough-cut stone on the ground floor, elegant arched windows above, a cornice like the brim of a hat. It was built at the end of the fifteenth century, and it looks as if nobody has touched it since.
Somebody did, very carefully. In 1911 the house was bought by an Englishman, Herbert Horne, and his story is one of the oddest in Florence. In 1890s London he had been a poet, a member of the Rhymers' Club alongside the young W. B. Yeats, as well as an architect, a designer of typefaces and the editor of an arts magazine. Then he fell in love with the Italian Renaissance, moved to Florence and gave years of his life to a single painter, Botticelli. His book on him, published in 1908, is still read by specialists.
Horne restored this palace room by room and filled it with what a Florentine merchant's home might have held: paintings, furniture, majolica, drawings, even kitchen things. Among the treasures is a small panel of Saint Stephen attributed to Giotto. When Horne died in 1916, aged only fifty-two, he left the house and everything in it to the Italian state, and it became a museum.
The palace belonged to cloth merchants, and the street you just walked, Corso dei Tintori, was the dyers' street, where the river water ran with colour. Wool and cloth made Florence rich, and the guilds ran the city. Even Dante had to join one to enter politics: after 1293 public office was reserved for guild members, so the poet enrolled in the guild of physicians and apothecaries, which also took in booksellers and painters.
Horne was one of many writers from England who made Florence their second home. The Brownings lived across the river, and George Eliot came here to research her novel Romola, set in Savonarola's city. Walk up Via de' Benci and turn right into the great open square in front of Santa Croce.