Torre della Zecca: The Last Tower of Dante's Walls

Why is it significant?

At the end of the street, alone on an island of traffic beside the Arno, rises a tall, square stone tower with nothing attached to it, as if the wall it once belonged to had simply walked away and left it standing guard.

Key Facts

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At the end of the street, alone on an island of traffic beside the Arno, rises a tall, square stone tower with nothing attached to it, as if the wall it once belonged to had simply walked away and left it standing guard.

This is the Torre della Zecca, one of the few surviving pieces of the last circle of walls Florence built around itself. Work began in 1284 and the circuit was finished around 1333. The tower is named after the zecca, the city mint, which once stood nearby by the river. Dante was nineteen when the building began, and he watched his city burst out of its old clothes.

What the mint produced changed Europe. The gold florin, first struck in 1252, became the dollar of the Middle Ages, trusted from London to Constantinople. And where there is good money, there are forgers. In the Inferno Dante meets Master Adam, who forged florins for a family of counts in the hills of the Casentino and was burned alive for it in 1281. Dante punishes him with a swollen belly and an endless thirst, dreaming of the cool streams of his valley. Florentine readers knew exactly who he was.

Dante had complicated feelings about all this money. In Paradise his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida praises the old Florence, sober and modest inside its ancient circle of walls, before the city grew rich. And in Hell, Dante blames the newcomers and their sudden gains for the pride and excess that tore Florence apart. The very walls being built around him were, to his eyes, a sign of a city growing too big for its virtue.

Most of those walls disappeared between 1865 and 1871, when Florence was briefly the capital of Italy and the architect Giuseppe Poggi replaced them with wide boulevards. A few gates and this tower were spared. Now follow the river west along the Lungarno della Zecca Vecchia to a vast building with a tall tower of its own, the house of millions of books.