Guilds, Feuds and Bonfires: The Florentine Republic Walk in Florence

From the foundlings' loggia of the Bigallo to the plaque where Savonarola burned: guild saints, a party that owned the city, a murder on the bridge, the Pope's banker, the Republic's prison and the palace where Florence governed itself

Florence · 12 stops · 28 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Loggia del Bigallo: The Republic's Charity

Piazza di San Giovanni 1, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

Stand at the corner where Via dei Calzaiuoli meets the cathedral square and look at the little marble loggia with two delicate Gothic arches, wedged against the houses. Next to the giants around it, it is easy to miss. But this small porch tells you how the Republic looked after the people who fell through its cracks.

The loggia was built in the 1350s for the Misericordia, a confraternity of ordinary citizens devoted to works of mercy. Florence had no welfare state; it had brotherhoods like this one, run by laymen, funded by donations and bequests, which carried the sick to hospital, buried the dead and cared for orphans. Later the building passed to a second brotherhood, the Bigallo, named after a hospice in the hills outside the city, and the name stuck to the loggia.

Under these arches lost and abandoned children were put on show, so that parents could recognise and reclaim them. If nobody came forward within a few days, the confraternity sent them to foster families. It sounds harsh, but in a city of plague, famine and poverty it was a public safety net, in the most public place in town. In 1445 the Silk Guild's new foundling hospital, the Ospedale degli Innocenti, took over much of that work.

Inside, the small museum keeps a fresco of the Madonna of Mercy painted in 1342, sheltering the citizens under her cloak. At her feet lies the oldest known view of Florence: walls, towers, the Baptistery and a cathedral still under construction. It is a portrait of the Republic at the height of its wealth, six years before the Black Death killed perhaps half of its people.

And the Misericordia never stopped. Its brothers once worked in black hooded robes, so that no one could thank them by name, and its headquarters has stood on the cathedral square since the sixteenth century; it still runs ambulances today, one of the oldest charities in the world. Now walk south down Via dei Calzaiuoli, the busy street of the stocking-makers, to a tall stone block ringed with statues.
2. Orsanmichele: The Guilds' Granary Church

Via dell'Arte della Lana, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

Stand on Via dei Calzaiuoli and face the tall, square block of stone that looks more like a warehouse than a church... because that is exactly what it was. Now count the niches around its walls. There are fourteen of them, each with a saint inside, and every one of those saints was paid for by a different trade.

Orsanmichele began as an open loggia for the city's grain market. After a fire, the commune rebuilt it from 1337, with granaries on the upper floors, and inside you can still find openings in the pillars where grain once slid down chutes to the hall below. A miracle-working image of the Madonna on one of those pillars drew crowds of pilgrims, the open arches were walled in, and the market became a church. Bread upstairs, prayers downstairs. Very Florentine.

Then came the competition. The commune handed the niches to the guilds, the arti, which ran the Republic. There were twenty-one of them, seven major and fourteen minor: wool merchants, bankers, judges, doctors and apothecaries, butchers, armourers. Each guild had to fill its niche with its patron saint, and nobody wanted to look poor. Marble was respectable. Bronze was a statement, and only the richest guilds could afford it. In 1412 the cloth merchants of the Calimala commissioned Lorenzo Ghiberti's Saint John the Baptist, the first life-size bronze statue of the Renaissance.

Walk slowly around the building and you pass a parade of genius. Donatello's Saint George for the armourers, alert and ready for a fight. Verrocchio's Doubting Thomas for the merchants' court, with Thomas stepping half out of his niche to touch the wound of Christ. What you see outside today are faithful copies; the originals are kept safe in the museum upstairs and, for Saint George, in the Bargello.

Think of it as the city's first billboard. Every passer-by could read who was rich, who was pious and who was in charge. After the Ordinances of Justice of 1293, the top offices were reserved for men enrolled in a guild, so these statues were also a list of the people allowed to govern. Now head south-west, past the arcaded Mercato Nuovo with its bronze boar, to the palace of the party that once owned half the confiscated property in town.
3. Palazzo di Parte Guelfa: The Party That Owned the City

Piazza di Parte Guelfa, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

Step into the small Piazza di Parte Guelfa and face the battlemented medieval palace with its outside staircase and its Gothic windows. It looks like a town hall, and in a way it was: the headquarters of a political party so rich and so feared that it behaved like a second government.

Florence's great quarrel of the thirteenth century was between the Guelphs, who backed the Pope, and the Ghibellines, who backed the Holy Roman Emperor. In practice the labels covered older things: family hatreds, business rivalries, and the simple question of who would sit in the palace and who would be thrown out of town.

In 1260 the Ghibellines crushed the Florentine Guelphs at the battle of Montaperti, and for a moment their allies talked of razing Florence altogether. Then the tide turned. After 1267 the Guelphs were back for good, and the Ghibelline clans went into exile. The houses of the Uberti, their leaders, were torn down, and the empty ground they left became part of Piazza della Signoria. Victors in Florence did not just win; they rearranged the map.

The captains of the Parte Guelfa met in this palace and administered the property confiscated from the losers, which made the party enormously wealthy. In the fifteenth century Filippo Brunelleschi, the genius of the cathedral dome, worked on enlarging its great hall. Look for the party's emblem around the city: a red eagle gripping a green dragon in its claws.

And the party had a nasty weapon. In the 1370s its leaders could have a rival officially warned, ammonito, as a suspected Ghibelline, which barred him from office. Abuse of that power helped light the fuse of the revolt of 1378, when the Ciompi, the wool workers who had no guild of their own, stormed the government and briefly made a wool carder, Michele di Lando, head of the Republic. Now follow the lanes west and south to Borgo Santi Apostoli, where a little church hides below street level.
4. Santi Apostoli: Crusader Flints and the Pazzi

Piazza del Limbo 1, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

You have found one of the quietest squares in central Florence, Piazza del Limbo, and the plain Romanesque front of Santi Apostoli, sitting lower than the street around it. The odd name of the square is no joke: the story goes that this was once a burial ground for babies who died before baptism, the souls medieval theology placed in limbo.

Beside the door, a stone inscription proudly claims that Charlemagne himself founded the church in 805, with legendary paladins among the witnesses. It is a medieval invention, a piece of civic boasting, and historians date the building to the eleventh century. But that is the Republic in a nutshell... a city of merchants who badly wanted ancient, noble ancestors.

The real treasure is inside. The church keeps fragments of stone said to come from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, brought home, according to tradition, by Pazzino de' Pazzi, who was supposedly the first crusader over the walls in 1099. Every Easter a fire is struck from those flints and carried in procession to the cathedral, where it sets off the Scoppio del Carro, the explosion of the cart... a towering wagon of fireworks lit by a rocket shaped like a dove.

Remember that family name. The Pazzi became bankers and rivals of the Medici, and in 1478 they plotted to murder Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici during Mass in the cathedral. Giuliano was stabbed to death; Lorenzo escaped, wounded. The revenge was savage. Conspirators were hanged from the windows of the Palazzo Vecchio, and the family's name and coats of arms were ordered removed from the city.

And yet the flints stayed here, and the Easter ritual went on. In a republic that destroyed so many of its own families, the ceremonies outlived the people. From the square, walk west along Borgo Santi Apostoli to the fortress-like palace at its end, facing the river.
5. Palazzo Spini Feroni: The Pope's Banker and the Black Guelphs

Via de' Tornabuoni 2, 50123 Firenze FI, Italy

At the end of Borgo Santi Apostoli a fortress blocks the way: a huge stone palace with a crown of battlements, its flank running along the river and its front facing the bridge of Santa Trinita. Every other building around here looks polite next to it. That was the idea.

Palazzo Spini was begun in 1289 for Geri Spini, a merchant banker whose company handled money for Pope Boniface VIII. It was one of the largest private palaces of medieval Florence, built at the end of a bridge, where whoever held it could watch the traffic in and out of the city. In a Republic where politics was settled by armed clans, a palace this size was a statement of how many men you could put on the street.

Remember the Guelph party you met earlier? Once the Ghibellines were gone, the winners split in two, the Blacks and the Whites, and Geri Spini was one of the leaders of the Blacks, closely tied to the Pope. In 1301 the French prince Charles of Valois rode into Florence, officially as a peacemaker, and the Blacks seized power under his protection. Hundreds of Whites were condemned, and in 1302 one of them, a former prior named Dante Alighieri, was exiled for ever.

Here is the twist. Boccaccio, writing a few decades later, turned Messer Geri Spini into a character in the Decameron, a grand and courteous gentleman who learns a lesson in manners from a humble baker called Cisti; in the same day of stories, his wife Madonna Oretta puts a boring storyteller in his place with a single witty remark. The man who helped drive out Dante became a figure of urbane Florentine conversation.

The battlements you see were largely restored in the nineteenth century, but the bulk is medieval, and it still dominates this corner of the river. From here, walk east along the Lungarno degli Acciaiuoli, with the water on your right, until the street runs into the oldest bridge in Florence.
6. Ponte Vecchio: The Murder That Split Florence

Ponte Vecchio, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

Walk out to the middle of Ponte Vecchio, where the double row of jewellers' shops suddenly breaks open, and lean on the parapet with the river on both sides of you. The bronze bust above you is Benvenuto Cellini, goldsmith, sculptor, brawler and shameless self-promoter.

The bridge you are standing on dates from 1345, rebuilt after the terrible flood of 1333 swept the old one away. Its shops did not always sparkle. They belonged to butchers and tanners, who found the river very handy for throwing things into. In 1593 Grand Duke Ferdinando I lost patience with the smell drifting up to the corridor his family walked through above the shops, threw them out, and gave the bridge to goldsmiths.

For the Republic, though, this spot meant blood. On Easter morning in 1216, according to the chroniclers, a young nobleman called Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti rode across the bridge to his wedding. He had broken off an engagement with a girl of the Amidei family to marry someone else. At the foot of the bridge, beside an ancient statue of Mars, the Amidei and their allies were waiting, and they cut him down. Florentine writers, Dante among them, dated the city's split into Guelphs and Ghibellines to that killing.

A private feud became a war between parties that lasted generations, with exiles, confiscations and burned houses on both sides. Much later, in August 1944, the retreating German army blew up every other bridge in Florence and spared only this one, but mined the streets at either end instead, destroying medieval towers and houses on both banks. Above the shops runs the Vasari Corridor, built in 1565 for the Medici and reopened to visitors in December 2024.

So the oldest bridge in town carries both stories: the Republic's founding quarrel and its Medici ending. Step back onto the city side, and just behind the Uffizi find the short street called Via dei Georgofili, beside a medieval tower.
7. Via dei Georgofili: The Night of 27 May 1993

Via dei Georgofili, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

Stop at the corner by the Torre dei Pulci, the medieval tower at the back of the Uffizi, and take a moment before reading the plaques on its wall. The tower is the home of the Accademia dei Georgofili, founded in 1753 to study agriculture, one of the oldest academies of its kind in the world.

Shortly after one o'clock in the morning on 27 May 1993, a vehicle packed with explosives blew up in this narrow street. Part of the tower collapsed. Inside lived Fabrizio Nencioni and his wife Angela, who looked after the academy, with their daughters Nadia, who was nine, and Caterina, who was less than two months old. All four were killed. Dario Capolicchio, a twenty-two-year-old architecture student, died in the fire that swept a building across the street.

The bomb was the work of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, part of a campaign of attacks that year in Florence, Rome and Milan, aimed at forcing the Italian state to back down. Dozens of people were injured. In the Uffizi, windows and ceilings gave way, several paintings were destroyed and many more were damaged, and restorers spent years repairing what could be saved. The bosses who ordered the attack were later tried and convicted.

There is nothing to see here in the tourist sense, and that is the point. The tower was rebuilt, the gallery reopened, and every year on the anniversary Florentines come back to this corner to remember the five names.

On a walk about power, it is a hard lesson to stand beside. The old Republic fought its quarrels with towers and knives; in 1993 a criminal organisation tried to bend a democratic state with a bomb aimed at a family, a student and a museum, and the city did not bend. Walk on quietly through Via Lambertesca to where the long courtyard of the Uffizi meets the Loggia dei Lanzi.
8. Loggia dei Lanzi & the Uffizi: Offices of Power

Piazzale degli Uffizi, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

Stand where the great open arches of the Loggia dei Lanzi meet the start of the Uffizi, and look down the long, narrow courtyard between two grey colonnades to the river. Before it was the most famous art gallery in Italy, this was an office block... and its name still says so. Uffizi simply means offices.

Start with the loggia. It was built between 1376 and 1382 for the Republic's public ceremonies, a stage where the Signoria swore in magistrates and received ambassadors in front of the crowd. Two centuries later Duke Cosimo I de' Medici posted his German mercenary guards here, the Landsknechte, and Florentines shortened them to Lanzi. The Republic's ceremonial porch became the duke's guardhouse, and the name stuck.

Then, in 1560, Cosimo commissioned Giorgio Vasari to gather the magistracies of the old Republic, its guild offices and courts, under one roof right next to his palace. A whole medieval neighbourhood was knocked down to make room, and part of the ancient church of San Pier Scheraggio was swallowed into the new building. Vasari died in 1574 and others finished the job, while Cosimo's son Francesco I began turning the top floor into a gallery for the family's treasures.

Here is the irony. The institutions that once governed Florence still existed, with their old names and their old seals, but now they worked as clerks in the duke's corridor, within shouting distance of the ruler. Look along the pillars: the marble statues of famous Tuscans in the niches, Dante, Giotto, Galileo and Machiavelli among them, were added in the nineteenth century.

And under the loggia, Cellini's bronze Perseus, unveiled in 1554, holds up the severed head of Medusa. Many read it as a message from the new regime to anyone still dreaming of the Republic. Now walk the length of the colonnade down to the river, turn left along the Lungarno, and stop at the palace on the corner of a small square.
9. Museo Galileo: Moons Named for a Duke

Piazza dei Giudici 1, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

On the corner of the little Piazza dei Giudici stands a solid medieval palace, Palazzo Castellani, with the words Museo Galileo above the door. Behind those walls is one of the great collections of scientific instruments in the world, and almost all of it was gathered by people who ruled Florence.

Inside are the scientific collections of the Medici and of the Lorraine grand dukes who followed them: globes, astrolabes, armillary spheres, the thermometers of the Accademia del Cimento, one of Europe's first experimental academies, founded under Medici patronage in 1657... and the only two telescopes made by Galileo Galilei that survive.

In January 1610 Galileo pointed a telescope at Jupiter and saw four small points of light circling it. He was a professor in Padua, in the Venetian Republic, and he wanted a job back home in Tuscany. So he called the new moons the Medicean Stars, after the young Grand Duke Cosimo II and his three brothers, and dedicated his book, the Starry Messenger, to Cosimo. It worked. That same year he became Chief Mathematician and Philosopher to the Grand Duke. The museum keeps a cracked lens, said to be the objective of the telescope he used, set in an elaborate frame.

And then there is the finger. In 1737, almost a century after Galileo died under house arrest, his body was moved to a grand tomb in Santa Croce, and admirers took a few relics. One of them was the middle finger of his right hand. It stands upright in a glass egg, pointing at the sky... or, as Florentines like to say, at somebody else.

It is a story about power, too. The Republic had become a court, and genius now needed a prince to pay for it, a prince who could not protect Galileo when Rome tried him in 1633. From here, head north through Via dei Castellani and Via dei Leoni, behind the Palazzo Vecchio, then up Via del Proconsolo, and turn left into the tiny Piazza San Martino.
10. Torre della Castagna: Where the Priors Were Locked In

Piazza San Martino, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

In the tiny Piazza San Martino a squat, almost windowless stone tower rises above the rooftops, rough and severe, like a chess rook that forgot to finish growing. This is the Torre della Castagna, and for a few years at the end of the 1200s it was the most important building in Florence.

Picture the medieval city as a forest of towers like this one, each belonging to a clan of nobles who could shoot from the top and hide behind the walls during a feud. Around 1250 the government of the people ordered private towers cut down in height, and many of them still stand today as stumps.

In 1282 the guilds took control of the state and created a new government, the priors of the guilds. Before the Palazzo Vecchio existed, they chose this tower as their first seat. And here is the clever part: under the rules of the Republic, the priors served for just two months and lived shut in together for their whole term, eating and sleeping in their headquarters, so nobody could reach them with bribes or threats.

The tower's name means the chestnut. The story goes that the priors voted by dropping chestnuts into a bag, and the tower took its name from those humble ballots. Florence later chose its officials by drawing names from leather bags, so the legend is at least true to the spirit of the place.

Two decades later, in the summer of 1300, a poet named Dante Alighieri served his own two months as a prior. Within two years his party had lost, and he was exiled from Florence for life, never to return. The Republic gave power with one hand and took it away with the other. Now go back to Via del Proconsolo and follow Via Ghibellina east, past the Bargello, the old palace of the podestà, to a theatre with a dark past.
11. Le Stinche: The Republic's Prison

Via Ghibellina 99, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

On Via Ghibellina you are facing the front of the Teatro Verdi, a nineteenth-century theatre... and the street running beside it carries a strange name, Via dell'Isola delle Stinche, the Island of the Stinche. That island was a whole city block surrounded by blind walls: the main prison of the Florentine Republic.

It was built around 1300, and it took its name from its first inmates. The story goes that in 1304 Florence captured the castle of Le Stinche, in the hills of the Val di Greve, held by rebels of the losing faction, and locked its defenders up here. The castle was forgotten; the name stuck to the prison for more than five hundred years.

Think about who filled it. In a city built on credit, debt was a crime. A merchant who could not pay could end up behind these walls next to rebels, thieves and the insane, dependent on charity for his food, while his creditors waited for his family to settle. Pious Florentines left money in their wills to bring bread and alms to the prisoners.

By many accounts, even Niccolò Machiavelli spent time in a cell in 1513. When the Medici came back, he was arrested on suspicion of plotting against them, tortured, and released only in an amnesty, and he wrote bitter, funny sonnets about prison life and its lice.

The prison closed in the 1830s, and the theatre that replaced it opened in 1854, renamed in honour of Giuseppe Verdi in 1901. And a few streets east, a square bears the name of the Milanese writer Cesare Beccaria, whose arguments helped Tuscany become, in 1786, the first state in the world to abolish the death penalty. Now turn back west along Via Ghibellina, cross Via del Proconsolo into Piazza San Firenze, and follow Via dei Gondi into the great square where the story ends.
12. Piazza della Signoria & Palazzo Vecchio: Savonarola's Fire

Piazza della Signoria, 50122 Firenze FI, Italy

Find the round stone plaque set into the pavement in front of the Neptune Fountain, then lift your eyes to the fortress-palace beside it and its tower rising to almost a hundred metres. That plaque marks the spot where the Republic burned its own prophet.

Girolamo Savonarola was a Dominican friar from Ferrara who preached in Florence about corruption, luxury and coming punishment. When the Medici were driven out in 1494 his influence became enormous; in this square his followers lit bonfires of vanities, burning mirrors, cards, fine clothes and paintings. But he defied the Pope, an ordeal by fire planned in 1498 never took place, and the crowd turned on him. On 23 May 1498, after torture and trial, he and two fellow friars were hanged and burned right here, and their ashes thrown into the Arno.

The palace was begun in 1299 as the Palazzo dei Priori, the home of the government whose first seat you saw in Piazza San Martino. Its bell, nicknamed the Cow, called citizens to assembly. After 1494 a vast hall was built inside for the Great Council of the restored Republic, and Leonardo and Michelangelo were both commissioned to paint battle scenes for its walls. Neither ever finished.

Every statue here is a political argument. The Republic set Michelangelo's David at the palace door in 1504 as a warning to tyrants; the original stood there until 1873. Then the Medici answered with their own: Cellini's Perseus in the loggia, and Giambologna's bronze Cosimo I on horseback in the middle of the square. After a final siege in 1530 the Republic was gone for good, and Florence belonged to dukes.

Yet the city remembers. Every year on 23 May, Florentines cover this plaque with flowers and scatter petals into the river from Ponte Vecchio. Charity and guilds, feuds and bankers, a prison and a bonfire... you have walked the whole life of a republic in a single morning. Look up at that tower once more. It was built to say that Florence governed itself.