Palazzo Antinori & the Wine Window
Why is it significant?
The street widens into the small Piazza degli Antinori, and in front of you stands a severe Renaissance palace of rough-cut stone. Now lower your eyes. Near the great door, at about waist height, there is a tiny arched opening framed in stone, no bigger than a book.
Key Facts
| Place | Palazzo Antinori & the Wine Window |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza degli Antinori 3, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77290, 11.25110 |
| Part of Walk | Tripe, Truffles and Wine Windows: A Food Lover's Walk Through Florence |
| Generated | Generated |
The street widens into the small Piazza degli Antinori, and in front of you stands a severe Renaissance palace of rough-cut stone. Now lower your eyes. Near the great door, at about waist height, there is a tiny arched opening framed in stone, no bigger than a book. It is a buchetta del vino, a wine window.
The palace was built in the 1460s and bought in 1506 by the Antinori, and here is the astonishing part. The family has been in the wine trade since 1385, when Giovanni di Piero Antinori joined the vintners' guild of Florence. More than twenty-five generations later, the same name is still on bottles of Chianti and Tuscan reds sold around the world.
From the sixteenth century, the Medici rulers allowed noble families to sell wine from their country estates directly from their town palaces, without a middleman. So they cut little windows into their walls. You knocked, a servant inside opened the wooden shutter, took your empty flask and handed it back full. No tavern, no bill, no conversation. Well over a hundred of these windows have been counted in the old city, most of them bricked up or painted over, easy to miss once you stop looking down.
They came into their own during the plague of 1630. A Florentine writer of the time, Francesco Rondinelli, described wine being passed through the windows without contact, and payment taken on a metal tray and disinfected with vinegar. Nearly four centuries later, in 2020, during the Covid lockdowns, some of these windows opened again, handing out wine, coffee and even gelato to customers standing at a safe distance.
It is hard to think of a better symbol of Florence: a city that keeps its medieval solutions in the wall, just in case. Now make your way north-east through the narrow streets to the big square of San Lorenzo, where a saint who died on a gridiron rules over the city's most famous steak.