Porta San Frediano: The Gate on the Road to Pisa
Why is it significant?
Walk right up to the gate and lay your palm against one of the doors: thick wooden planks studded with iron, each leaf several times your height, swung open centuries ago and never shut again in your lifetime.
Key Facts
| Place | Porta San Frediano: The Gate on the Road to Pisa |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza di Verzaia, 50124 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.77050, 11.24020 |
| Part of Walk | Florence Across the Arno: Oltrarno Artisans, Santo Spirito & San Frediano |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk right up to the gate and lay your palm against one of the doors: thick wooden planks studded with iron, each leaf several times your height, swung open centuries ago and never shut again in your lifetime. These are among the original doors of the medieval walls of Florence, and they have watched carts, armies and wedding processions pass beneath.
Porta San Frediano was built in the 1330s, as part of the last ring of city walls, and its design is often attributed to the sculptor Andrea Pisano. This was the western door of Florence, on the road to Pisa, and through it came salt, grain and cloth carried up from the sea. At the gate, customs officers checked every load and collected the duties that paid for the walls themselves.
Look up and notice how squat the tower is. Once it stood much taller. In the sixteenth century, when cannon had made high towers into easy targets, the Florentines cut most of their gate towers down to the level of the walls. The siege of 1529 and 1530, when the last Florentine Republic held out for almost a year against the armies of the Pope and the Emperor, was fought around walls like these.
Florence wanted its gate to look strong, too. The gate was built to impress as much as to defend, a message to every traveller arriving from Pisa, the old rival on the coast: you are entering a city that can defend itself. The stretch of wall that still runs beside you shows how thick that message was.
This is where the walk ends. You crossed the river on a bridge pulled out of the water, met a Grand Duchess, two poets, a sparrow and a hidden Pontormo, a teenage Michelangelo and the painter who taught him, and a bridge that fell under a vision of Hell. Turn around and look back down Borgo San Frediano... the other Florence, the one with its sleeves rolled up, is still working.