Fortezza da Basso
Why is it significant?
In front of you rises a long, low wall of brick and stone, angled like the prow of a ship and so massive that the trees beside it look like shrubs. This is the Fortezza da Basso, and it was built to point its guns not outwards at an enemy, but inwards, at Florence itself.
Key Facts
| Place | Fortezza da Basso |
|---|---|
| Address | Viale Filippo Strozzi 1, 50129 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.78160, 11.24890 |
| Part of Walk | Florence, Capital of Italy: Boulevards, Exiles and the English Cemetery |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you rises a long, low wall of brick and stone, angled like the prow of a ship and so massive that the trees beside it look like shrubs. This is the Fortezza da Basso, and it was built to point its guns not outwards at an enemy, but inwards, at Florence itself.
In 1530 the Florentine republic fell after a long siege, and the Medici came back with the backing of the emperor and the pope. The new duke, Alessandro de' Medici, trusted nobody, and he was right not to. Between 1534 and 1537 the architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger raised this pentagon of bastions as a refuge and a threat. It did not save its master. In 1537 Alessandro was murdered in a bedroom in the city by his own cousin Lorenzino, who had lured him there with the promise of a lady.
Now jump three centuries. In 1864 a treaty with France obliged the young Kingdom of Italy to move its capital away from Turin, as a pledge that it had given up on Rome. Turin rioted, and dozens of people died in the streets. Florence was chosen, and in 1865 the king, the parliament, the ministries and tens of thousands of officials, officers and their families arrived in a city that had no room for them.
The answer was to tear down the medieval walls on this side of the river and to build a modern city on their line. The walls fell. The gates and this fortress stayed. Today the Fortezza hosts the great fashion fairs, and inside its bastions the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the state restoration institute, has workshops where some of the paintings damaged in the flood of 1966 were brought back to life.
This walk follows those six years when Florence was the capital of Italy, and the foreigners who had already made it their home. Walk east along the edge of the fortress park and into Piazza dell'Indipendenza, the first new square of nineteenth-century Florence.