Piazza dell'Indipendenza & Villino Trollope

Why is it significant?

You are in a big rectangular garden square, with tall plane trees, gravel paths and dignified nineteenth-century houses all around. Two statues of gentlemen in frock coats stand on their pedestals, and nobody looks at them. Let us change that.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You are in a big rectangular garden square, with tall plane trees, gravel paths and dignified nineteenth-century houses all around. Two statues of gentlemen in frock coats stand on their pedestals, and nobody looks at them. Let us change that.

This square was laid out in the 1840s, the first planned residential district built outside the old medieval tissue but still inside the walls. It was named after the grand duchess of the day. Then in 1859 the last grand duke of Tuscany left Florence without a shot being fired, Tuscany voted to join the new Italian kingdom, and the square was renamed for Independence.

The statues are Bettino Ricasoli, the iron baron who steered Tuscany into Italy, and Ubaldino Peruzzi, who was mayor of Florence from 1870. Peruzzi inherited the bill for the capital years: new boulevards, new squares, new markets, all built on borrowed money. When the capital moved on to Rome in 1871, the money stopped and the debt remained, and in 1878 the city of Florence went bankrupt.

One of these houses was the Villino Trollope, where the English writer Thomas Adolphus Trollope lived with his wife Theodosia and his formidable mother Frances, the author of a scandalous best seller about the manners of the Americans, and mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope. Their evenings were a crossroads of the foreign colony: Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Walter Savage Landor, and George Eliot when she came to research her Florentine novel. Theodosia wrote passionate dispatches for the London press in favour of Italian unity.

By the mid nineteenth century thousands of British, Americans, Russians and Germans lived in Florence, drawn by art, climate and very cheap rents. They had their own bankers, chemists, churches and newspapers. Some of them built a church you would never expect in Tuscany. Walk north up Via Leone X, and look for the onion domes.