San Firenze: Zeffirelli's Shakespeare and Florence's Courts

Why is it significant?

At the southern end of Via del Proconsolo the street opens into Piazza San Firenze, and one whole side of it is a single enormous Baroque front: a church at each end and a long convent in between, as if three buildings had agreed to wear one costume for a party.

Key Facts

Open the walk

At the southern end of Via del Proconsolo the street opens into Piazza San Firenze, and one whole side of it is a single enormous Baroque front: a church at each end and a long convent in between, as if three buildings had agreed to wear one costume for a party.

This is the complex of San Firenze, built over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for the Oratorians, the followers of Saint Philip Neri. After Italian unification the convent took on a sterner role: for generations it housed the law courts of Florence, until they moved to a new palace of justice on the edge of the city in the 2010s. So for a long time the judges of Florence worked within sight of the Bargello, where the Podestà had once condemned Dante.

Today the building belongs to stories again. Since 2017 it has been home to the foundation of Franco Zeffirelli, the director born in Florence in 1923, with rooms full of his sketches, set designs and costumes for the theatre, the opera and the cinema. For a literary walk he matters because of one writer above all: Shakespeare. Zeffirelli filmed The Taming of the Shrew with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, a Romeo and Juliet in 1968 with actors barely older than the lovers, and a Hamlet in 1990. For millions of teenagers, his Romeo and Juliet was Shakespeare.

Even his name is a small piece of literature. The story goes that his mother, who could not give him his father's surname, chose a word from an aria in Mozart's Idomeneo, Zeffiretti lusinghieri, the flattering little breezes, and that a clerk's spelling mistake turned it into Zeffirelli. As a boy he learned English from the elderly British ladies who lived in Florence before the war, and decades later he turned those memories into the film Tea with Mussolini.

When the Arno flooded in November 1966, Zeffirelli took a camera into the drowned city, and you will hear what came of it a little later, at the library. Florence keeps doing this: condemning, judging, then telling the story beautifully. Walk round behind the Bargello into Via Ghibellina and follow it east to the corner of Via Michelangelo Buonarroti.