Piazza dei Ciompi & Vasari's Loggia del Pesce
Why is it significant?
Along one side of this square runs a graceful row of grey stone arches with round medallions above them, so elegant you might take it for the porch of a church. It was built for something much smellier. This is the Loggia del Pesce, the fish market.
Key Facts
| Place | Piazza dei Ciompi & Vasari's Loggia del Pesce |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza dei Ciompi, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77120, 11.26470 |
| Part of Walk | Tripe, Truffles and Wine Windows: A Food Lover's Walk Through Florence |
| Generated | Generated |
Along one side of this square runs a graceful row of grey stone arches with round medallions above them, so elegant you might take it for the porch of a church. It was built for something much smellier. This is the Loggia del Pesce, the fish market.
Its architect was Giorgio Vasari, the painter, builder and first great art historian, who designed it in 1567 for Duke Cosimo de' Medici. It did not stand here then. It stood in the Mercato Vecchio, the old market in the very centre of town, and its job was to gather the fishmongers into one tidy, controlled place. In a Catholic city with so many meatless days a year, fish was serious business, and freshness was policed by strict rules.
Then, in the 1880s, the city decided that the old centre was too crowded, too poor and too unhealthy, and demolished the whole market district. The loggia was taken apart stone by stone, each piece numbered, and put into storage. For decades it simply did not exist. Only in the 1950s was it reassembled in this square, where it never stood before. So one of the most Renaissance things you will see today has only been in this spot for about seventy years.
The square has its own story of hunger. The ciompi were the wool carders, the lowest and worst-paid workers of the great wool industry. In 1378 they rose up, demanded the right to their own guild, and for a few dizzy weeks one of them, Michele di Lando, sat at the head of the government. The revolt was crushed, but the name of the poorest workers of Florence stayed on this square.
Before you leave, look at the medallions above the arches once more and imagine them over barrels of eels and baskets of river fish. Now walk west along Via Pietrapiana and then the handsome Borgo degli Albizi, to the corner of Via del Proconsolo, where an unfinished palace hides the story of gelato.