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The Palazzo delle Cento Finestre, already known as Palazzo del Centauro, is located in Piazza Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence. On four sides, in fact, a number of openings of just under one hundred is placed. In this site there were in ancient times the houses of the hesses, of the Carnesecchi and perhaps of the Martini. At the end of the fifteenth century numerous of these buildings were purchased by Michele di Carlo Strozzi, but only at the beginning of the eighteenth century a real noble palace was built, probably since 1720. In 1744 Giuseppe Zocchi already included a view of the «Palazzo del Sig . Marquis Strozzi, of the centaur, and the road that leads to S. M. Novella »in the famous series of engravings of views of Florence. The «Centauro» appellation derives from the fact that at the time the sculptural group of Giambologna di Ercole with Centauro Nesso was located in front of the building, at the song of the Carnesecchi, where they converged via dei Cerretani, via Panzani, via de ‘Rondinelli and via dei Banchi, and only just before the mid -nineteenth century was he moved to the Loggia dei Lanzi.

This time we visit a building transformed over the centuries … a great testimony present in the area in question: it is the hospice called Orbatello I recommend not Orbetello and is located between via degli Alfani and via della Colonna. Perhaps on the design of Agnolo Gaddi was founded in 1372 thanks to the left of the banker-Mecenate Niccolò degli Alberti. The building takes its name from the orbades (from the lat.orbus- without) or women who had had deaths in the family, so much so that it is no longer self-sufficient. The hospice was large compared to the frequent city, it consisted of a hundred small “two -room apartments” and a small common cuisine, while the structure reserved for medical assistance was prepared for a few tens of beds.

October 1687 Arriva a merchant case at the Medici Court, addressed nothing less than in Cosimoiii. The Cassa embarked in Hamburg on the “San Bernardo” ship was wrapped in an incerated canvas from which an smell of spices came out, what did it contain? Perhaps rare spices or … in reality inside the body of Niels Stensen was located more commonly called Niccolò Stenone and the “perfume” of the spices was to cover the smell emanated by the body of the Danish scientist. But what did this character now deceased to the Medici court …. at that time one of the stars of the moment was our Galileo Galilei attracted precisely for those innovations in the Scientific field Stenone who landed on February 28, 1666 in Livorno and then headed in Pisa To meet Galileo. But was in Florence that Stenone felt like his house so much so that he wrote “that Florence was his real homeland”, the same Grand Duke besides giving a monthly salary assigned him an anatomical laboratory in the Opinion of S.Maria Nuova .