Viale Giacomo Matteotti: Poggi's Boulevards
Why is it significant?
Walk along the wide, tree-lined avenue and notice the shape of it. It curves gently, it is far wider than any street in the old centre, and it is lined with villas and apartment blocks set back behind gardens and railings.
Key Facts
| Place | Viale Giacomo Matteotti: Poggi's Boulevards |
|---|---|
| Address | Viale Giacomo Matteotti, 50132 Firenze FI, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 43.78140, 11.26420 |
| Part of Walk | Florence, Capital of Italy: Boulevards, Exiles and the English Cemetery |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along the wide, tree-lined avenue and notice the shape of it. It curves gently, it is far wider than any street in the old centre, and it is lined with villas and apartment blocks set back behind gardens and railings. You are walking exactly where the medieval walls of Florence stood until the 1860s.
Those walls had been begun in 1284 and they enclosed the city for almost six hundred years, with towers and gates every few hundred metres. When Florence became capital in 1865, the city council gave the architect Giuseppe Poggi the task of enlarging it. On this bank of the river he demolished the walls and replaced them with a ring of boulevards, the viali, inspired by the new boulevards of Paris.
Poggi thought big. South of the Arno he designed a scenic road winding up the hill and a great panoramic terrace at the top, the square that now carries Michelangelo's name and the most famous view of the city. Here on the north side, he gave Florence new districts with straight streets and gardens, for the officials, the deputies and the foreign residents who were pouring in.
The capital years were a fever. Land prices soared, speculators made fortunes, and old Florentines complained that their city was being turned into a building site for strangers. Then, in 1870, Italian troops entered Rome, and in 1871 the government simply packed up and left. Florence was left with half-built districts and a mountain of debt. The avenue now carries the name of Giacomo Matteotti, the socialist deputy murdered by Fascists in 1924.
Look ahead, in the middle of the traffic, and you will see an island of cypresses inside the boulevard itself. Poggi's ring road wrapped right around it, and that is why it became the most romantic graveyard in Florence. Keep walking south-east to Piazzale Donatello.