Via di Belvedere: Olive Groves Under the Walls
Why is it significant?
Walk slowly down the lane with the city wall on your left: tall, crenellated, built of rough brown stone, with a square tower every so often. On your right, behind a low wall, the slope falls away in terraces of olive trees, their leaves flipping silver whenever the wind moves them.
Key Facts
| Place | Via di Belvedere: Olive Groves Under the Walls |
|---|---|
| Address | Via di Belvedere, 50125 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.76240, 11.25800 |
| Part of Walk | Florence's Green Hill: Bardini Garden, San Miniato & Piazzale Michelangelo |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk slowly down the lane with the city wall on your left: tall, crenellated, built of rough brown stone, with a square tower every so often. On your right, behind a low wall, the slope falls away in terraces of olive trees, their leaves flipping silver whenever the wind moves them. You are in the middle of Florence... and it sounds like the countryside.
This is the longest surviving stretch of the last ring of walls of Florence, built in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. In their day they ran for more than eight kilometres around the city, with dozens of towers and gates. In the 1860s, when Florence briefly became the capital of Italy, most of them were demolished to make room for wide boulevards. Here, on the steep hillside, nobody needed a boulevard, so the wall survived.
Look over the wall at those olive trees. Some of them are older than they look; olive trees regrow from the roots, and after the terrible frost of 1985, which killed countless trees across Tuscany, many groves here were cut back to the stump and sprouted again. Every November the nets come out, and the olives are still picked here, inside the city limits, and pressed into fresh green oil.
Stop for a moment and listen. Swifts screaming around the towers in summer, a dog barking at a farmhouse, the bells of San Miniato carrying across the valley. Lizards sun themselves in the cracks of the wall, and the stone is warm under your hand even in the evening.
These walls saw real war. In 1529 and 1530, the armies of the Emperor and the Pope camped on these hills to besiege the last Florentine Republic, and the defenders watched them from these towers for nearly a year. Keep following the wall down the hill to the small gate at the bottom, Porta San Miniato.