Le Stinche: The Republic's Prison
Why is it significant?
On Via Ghibellina you are facing the front of the Teatro Verdi, a nineteenth-century theatre... and the street running beside it carries a strange name, Via dell'Isola delle Stinche, the Island of the Stinche.
Key Facts
| Place | Le Stinche: The Republic's Prison |
|---|---|
| Address | Via Ghibellina 99, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77020, 11.26120 |
| Part of Walk | Guilds, Feuds and Bonfires: The Florentine Republic Walk in Florence |
| Generated | Generated |
On Via Ghibellina you are facing the front of the Teatro Verdi, a nineteenth-century theatre... and the street running beside it carries a strange name, Via dell'Isola delle Stinche, the Island of the Stinche. That island was a whole city block surrounded by blind walls: the main prison of the Florentine Republic.
It was built around 1300, and it took its name from its first inmates. The story goes that in 1304 Florence captured the castle of Le Stinche, in the hills of the Val di Greve, held by rebels of the losing faction, and locked its defenders up here. The castle was forgotten; the name stuck to the prison for more than five hundred years.
Think about who filled it. In a city built on credit, debt was a crime. A merchant who could not pay could end up behind these walls next to rebels, thieves and the insane, dependent on charity for his food, while his creditors waited for his family to settle. Pious Florentines left money in their wills to bring bread and alms to the prisoners.
By many accounts, even Niccolò Machiavelli spent time in a cell in 1513. When the Medici came back, he was arrested on suspicion of plotting against them, tortured, and released only in an amnesty, and he wrote bitter, funny sonnets about prison life and its lice.
The prison closed in the 1830s, and the theatre that replaced it opened in 1854, renamed in honour of Giuseppe Verdi in 1901. And a few streets east, a square bears the name of the Milanese writer Cesare Beccaria, whose arguments helped Tuscany become, in 1786, the first state in the world to abolish the death penalty. Now turn back west along Via Ghibellina, cross Via del Proconsolo into Piazza San Firenze, and follow Via dei Gondi into the great square where the story ends.