Piazza Massimo d'Azeglio

Why is it significant?

Here is a green square that feels almost English: a railed garden with tall trees, benches, children's games, and all around, solid villas and apartment houses with balconies and little front gardens.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Here is a green square that feels almost English: a railed garden with tall trees, benches, children's games, and all around, solid villas and apartment houses with balconies and little front gardens. It belongs to a Florence most visitors never see, the Florence of the eighteen sixties and seventies.

This district grew on land inside the old walls that had long been fields and kilns, and it was laid out with straight streets and this garden in the middle, meant for the families of the new middle class that arrived with the capital: civil servants, lawyers, officers, deputies. It was a statement. Italy was a modern nation, and its people would live in modern, airy quarters.

The square is named after Massimo d'Azeglio, and he is a wonderful character. A Piedmontese aristocrat who first made his name as a landscape painter, then as a historical novelist, then as prime minister of the kingdom of Sardinia, the state that would unify Italy. A famous line is attributed to him: we have made Italy, now we must make Italians. Whether he said it in those words is doubtful, but it captures the problem the capital years faced.

He died in January 1866, just as Florence was settling into its new role, and the city gave his name to this square. In the decades that followed, many Jewish families, newly free to live wherever they wished, made their homes in these streets, a few minutes' walk from the great synagogue they were building.

Notice how quiet and residential it is, with no great monument at all. That was the dream of the planners: not palaces, but decent homes. Now walk south-east through the quiet grid of streets to the oval of Piazza Beccaria and its lonely medieval gate, a reminder of the walls that once enclosed all of this.