Florence, Capital of Italy: Boulevards, Exiles and the English Cemetery

The six years when Florence ruled a new kingdom, told along Poggi's boulevards: a Medici fortress, a Russian church, Lorraine's triumphal arch, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's grave, the Great Synagogue and an old opera house

Florence · 10 stops · 22 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Fortezza da Basso

   Viale Filippo Strozzi 1, 50129 Firenze FI, Italy

   In front of you rises a long, low wall of brick and stone, angled like the prow of a ship and so massive that the trees beside it look like shrubs. This is the Fortezza da Basso, and it was built to point its guns not outwards at an enemy, but inwards, at Florence itself.

   In 1530 the Florentine republic fell after a long siege, and the Medici came back with the backing of the emperor and the pope. The new duke, Alessandro de' Medici, trusted nobody, and he was right not to. Between 1534 and 1537 the architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger raised this pentagon of bastions as a refuge and a threat. It did not save its master. In 1537 Alessandro was murdered in a bedroom in the city by his own cousin Lorenzino, who had lured him there with the promise of a lady.

   Now jump three centuries. In 1864 a treaty with France obliged the young Kingdom of Italy to move its capital away from Turin, as a pledge that it had given up on Rome. Turin rioted, and dozens of people died in the streets. Florence was chosen, and in 1865 the king, the parliament, the ministries and tens of thousands of officials, officers and their families arrived in a city that had no room for them.

   The answer was to tear down the medieval walls on this side of the river and to build a modern city on their line. The walls fell. The gates and this fortress stayed. Today the Fortezza hosts the great fashion fairs, and inside its bastions the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, the state restoration institute, has workshops where some of the paintings damaged in the flood of 1966 were brought back to life.

   This walk follows those six years when Florence was the capital of Italy, and the foreigners who had already made it their home. Walk east along the edge of the fortress park and into Piazza dell'Indipendenza, the first new square of nineteenth-century Florence.

2. 2. Piazza dell'Indipendenza & Villino Trollope

   Piazza dell'Indipendenza, 50129 Firenze FI, Italy

   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.

3. 3. Russian Orthodox Church of the Nativity

   Via Leone X 8, 50129 Firenze FI, Italy

   Among the sober Florentine villas of Via Leone X, a burst of colour: bulbous onion domes, glazed tiles, a gilded cross. For a moment you could be in Moscow or Yaroslavl. This is the Russian Orthodox Church of the Nativity, and it is a monument to how fond the Russians were of Florence.

   It was built between 1899 and 1903 to a design by the Russian architect Mikhail Preobrazhensky, with Florentine builders and craftsmen. It is really two churches, one above the other: a lower church, low and intimate, and a taller upper church beneath the domes. Many of the icons and furnishings came from Russia.

   Who were its faithful? Diplomats, aristocrats on long Italian sojourns, painters, invalids hoping the Tuscan sun would cure their lungs. The richest of all were the Demidov family, whose fortune came from the iron mines of the Urals, and who built a palatial villa outside the city and filled it with art. Anatoly Demidov even married a niece of Napoleon.

   And the writers and composers came too. Fyodor Dostoevsky, short of money and on the run from creditors, spent the winter of 1868 in Florence and finished The Idiot there. Pyotr Tchaikovsky came in 1890 and, working at a furious pace, wrote most of his opera The Queen of Spades in a few weeks; later he named a string sextet Souvenir de Florence. Neither of them would have recognised this church, which came later, but they would have recognised the community that built it.

   After 1917 that community changed overnight. The rich visitors disappeared and the refugees from the revolution arrived, and this church became a lifeline for people who had lost a country. Services are still held here today. Now walk east along the boulevard to the great open space of Piazza della Libertà, with a medieval gate and a triumphal arch facing each other.

4. 4. Piazza della Libertà: Porta San Gallo & the Lorraine Arch

   Piazza della Libertà, 50129 Firenze FI, Italy

   Two monuments face each other across the traffic. On one side, a tall medieval gate in plain stone, standing alone with no wall on either side. On the other, a grand triumphal arch crowned with statues. Between them, arcades and a garden, and cars circling like the chariots of a racetrack.

   The gate is Porta San Gallo, built in the 1280s as part of the last ring of walls of medieval Florence. For centuries, travellers from Bologna and the north entered the city here, under the eyes of the customs men. Its wall has gone, and what was once the front door of Florence is now a gatehouse with no house.

   The arch tells a story of the end of a dynasty. In 1737 the last Medici grand duke died without heirs, and the European powers handed Tuscany to Francis Stephen of Lorraine, husband of the future empress Maria Theresa. Florence built this arch to welcome him, and he entered the city in January 1739. He stayed only a few months and never came back. The arch, meanwhile, took years to finish. A monument to a ruler who visited once.

   What you see around the two monuments is the capital of Italy at work. Giuseppe Poggi, the architect in charge of enlarging Florence, cleared the walls, kept the gate as a monument, and wrapped the space in uniform porticoes, an elegant Parisian-style square at the start of his new boulevards. It was first named after Cavour, the statesman who made Italy. The name Liberty came later.

   Florentines still argue about Poggi. Some call him the man who murdered the medieval walls, others the man who gave a cramped city air and light. Make up your own mind as you walk his boulevard: head south-east down the wide avenue of Viale Giacomo Matteotti.

5. 5. Viale Giacomo Matteotti: Poggi's Boulevards

   Viale Giacomo Matteotti, 50132 Firenze FI, Italy

   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.

6. 6. The English Cemetery & Elizabeth Barrett Browning

   Piazzale Donatello 38, 50132 Firenze FI, Italy

   In the middle of a roaring traffic island rises a small hill of cypresses, white marble and wild grass, closed by an iron gate. Cars swirl around it all day, and inside it is astonishingly quiet. This is the English Cemetery, though not everybody buried here was English.

   Until the nineteenth century there was no place in Catholic Florence to bury Protestants. In 1827 the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church bought this land, then just outside the walls near the gate of Pinti, and opened a cemetery for all Protestant foreigners. British, Americans, Swiss, Germans, Russians, even a few converts... well over a thousand people from many nations. It closed to new burials in 1877, once the city had grown around it.

   Find the raised tomb on columns, designed by the painter Frederic Leighton. Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the most famous poets of her age, died in Florence in June 1861 in her husband Robert's arms. She had thrown herself into the cause of Italian freedom, and wrote a long poem about watching history from the windows of their apartment. Florentines mourned her as one of their own. The city later placed a plaque on that house, saying that her verse had made a golden ring between Italy and England.

   Around her lie a whole society. The fierce old poet Walter Savage Landor, Arthur Hugh Clough, the American preacher and abolitionist Theodore Parker, and Frances Trollope, whose salon you heard about in Piazza dell'Indipendenza. It is often said that the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin, who lived in Florence and buried a young daughter here, was thinking of this cypress island when he painted his haunting Isle of the Dead.

   So the boulevard that destroyed the walls also created this island, which has survived every plan since. From here, walk south for a few blocks to Piazza Massimo d'Azeglio, a garden square of the capital years.

7. 7. Piazza Massimo d'Azeglio

   Piazza Massimo d'Azeglio, 50121 Firenze FI, Italy

   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.

8. 8. Piazza Beccaria & Porta alla Croce

   Piazza Cesare Beccaria, 50121 Firenze FI, Italy

   In the middle of a busy oval square stands a lone medieval tower-gate, marooned in traffic like a ship that forgot to leave port. Around it, the curved façades of nineteenth-century palaces follow the line of the square, all of a piece. This is Porta alla Croce, and the square is Piazza Beccaria.

   The gate was built in the 1280s, at the very start of the last medieval walls, as one of the main gates on the eastern side of the city. Through it ran the road east, up the valley of the Arno towards the Apennines. When Giuseppe Poggi pulled down the walls, he kept the gate and built this elegant oval around it, so that it would stand like a monument at the end of a perspective. Exactly what he did at Porta San Gallo.

   The name of the square carries one of the proudest stories in the history of Tuscany. Cesare Beccaria was a young Milanese jurist who in 1764 published a short book, On Crimes and Punishments, arguing that torture and the death penalty were both cruel and useless. It was read all over Europe. And on the thirtieth of November 1786 the grand duke of Tuscany, Peter Leopold of Lorraine, abolished the death penalty and torture. Tuscany was the first state in the modern world to do it, and every year that date is celebrated as the feast of Tuscany.

   A few streets south-west of here runs a short street with a sad name, Via dei Malcontenti, the street of the unhappy. That was the road the condemned walked, accompanied by hooded brothers of a confraternity who comforted them, to the place of execution outside the walls.

   So a gate of the old walls, a square of the capital years, and the name of an idea that changed European law, all in one place. Now walk back north-west towards a great green dome you have probably already glimpsed over the rooftops.

9. 9. Tempio Maggiore: The Great Synagogue

   Via Luigi Carlo Farini 6, 50121 Firenze FI, Italy

   Behind a garden and a railing rises a building of striped stone with horseshoe arches and a great green copper dome. It looks as if it had flown in from Andalusia or Istanbul, and it is one of the landmarks of the Florentine skyline. This is the Tempio Maggiore, the Great Synagogue of Florence.

   To understand why it is here, you have to go back to 1571, when Grand Duke Cosimo de' Medici forced the Jews of Tuscany into a ghetto, a cramped, walled quarter right beside the old market in the centre of the city, locked at night. It lasted for almost three centuries. The gates came down in the 1840s, and with Italian unification Jews finally became full citizens. Then, in the 1880s and 1890s, the old ghetto itself was demolished with the market, and on its ground rose Piazza della Repubblica.

   A free community wanted a temple worthy of the city. David Levi, the president of the community, left his fortune for it, and between 1874 and 1882 three architects, Marco Treves, Mariano Falcini and Vincenzo Micheli, built this synagogue. They chose the Moorish style on purpose: it was not a church, it was not a palace, it was something proudly different. Inside, every surface is painted with geometric patterns in warm colours.

   The twentieth century tested it. During the German occupation, Florentine Jews were rounded up and deported, and more than two hundred never returned. In August 1944 retreating German troops laid explosives in the building; some went off, but the structure survived. And in November 1966 the flood waters filled the prayer hall and damaged sacred scrolls and books, which were patiently restored.

   Today it is again a living synagogue, with a small museum of the community's history. From here, walk west along Via dei Pilastri and Via della Pergola to the theatre where the capital went in the evenings.

10. 10. Teatro della Pergola

    Via della Pergola 12, 50121 Firenze FI, Italy

    On narrow Via della Pergola, the façade is modest, almost shy, and you could walk past without noticing. But behind it is one of the oldest theatres in Italy still working, a horseshoe of gilded boxes rising tier upon tier around the stage.

    It opened in 1656, built in wood for a society of Florentine noblemen, and it is often described as the first theatre with superimposed rows of boxes, the model of the Italian opera house copied all over Europe. In the boxes, Florentine society did what it did best: it watched the stage, and it watched itself.

    On the fourteenth of March 1847 a young Giuseppe Verdi premiered his Macbeth here, his first Shakespeare opera, and he was relentless in rehearsal. The first Lady Macbeth later recalled that one duet was rehearsed more than a hundred times, because Verdi wanted it dark and dramatic rather than simply beautiful. And for a few years in the 1830s, among the stage machinists working behind the scenes, was Antonio Meucci, who later emigrated to Havana and New York and is remembered in Italy as an inventor of the telephone.

    During the capital years, these boxes filled with ministers, deputies, diplomats and the foreign colony you have met along the way: English writers, Russian princes, American sculptors. Deals were made here between acts, alliances sealed, gossip spread faster than any newspaper. Then, in 1871, the ministries left for Rome, and Florence went back to being itself.

    It is tempting to call those six years a failure: debts, a bankrupt city, a court that left. But walk back over what you have seen. The boulevards, the squares, the cemetery, the Russian church, the synagogue, the homes of the new middle class... the Florence beyond the Renaissance postcard was shaped in those years, by Italians and by foreigners who chose to stay. And this theatre, which saw it all from its boxes, is still raising its curtain tonight.