Palazzo di Parte Guelfa: The Party That Owned the City
Why is it significant?
Step into the small Piazza di Parte Guelfa and face the battlemented medieval palace with its outside staircase and its Gothic windows. It looks like a town hall, and in a way it was: the headquarters of a political party so rich and so feared that it behaved like a second government.
Key Facts
| Place | Palazzo di Parte Guelfa: The Party That Owned the City |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza di Parte Guelfa, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.76970, 11.25350 |
| Part of Walk | Guilds, Feuds and Bonfires: The Florentine Republic Walk in Florence |
| Generated | Generated |
Step into the small Piazza di Parte Guelfa and face the battlemented medieval palace with its outside staircase and its Gothic windows. It looks like a town hall, and in a way it was: the headquarters of a political party so rich and so feared that it behaved like a second government.
Florence's great quarrel of the thirteenth century was between the Guelphs, who backed the Pope, and the Ghibellines, who backed the Holy Roman Emperor. In practice the labels covered older things: family hatreds, business rivalries, and the simple question of who would sit in the palace and who would be thrown out of town.
In 1260 the Ghibellines crushed the Florentine Guelphs at the battle of Montaperti, and for a moment their allies talked of razing Florence altogether. Then the tide turned. After 1267 the Guelphs were back for good, and the Ghibelline clans went into exile. The houses of the Uberti, their leaders, were torn down, and the empty ground they left became part of Piazza della Signoria. Victors in Florence did not just win; they rearranged the map.
The captains of the Parte Guelfa met in this palace and administered the property confiscated from the losers, which made the party enormously wealthy. In the fifteenth century Filippo Brunelleschi, the genius of the cathedral dome, worked on enlarging its great hall. Look for the party's emblem around the city: a red eagle gripping a green dragon in its claws.
And the party had a nasty weapon. In the 1370s its leaders could have a rival officially warned, ammonito, as a suspected Ghibelline, which barred him from office. Abuse of that power helped light the fuse of the revolt of 1378, when the Ciompi, the wool workers who had no guild of their own, stormed the government and briefly made a wool carder, Michele di Lando, head of the Republic. Now follow the lanes west and south to Borgo Santi Apostoli, where a little church hides below street level.