City Tour

Today, we wanted to relate the story of, or recall a portion of, the Gran Hotel Baglioni, which was held by Prince Carrega de Lucedio in the nineteenth century. The Baglioni hotel’s lateral half is visible from Piazza dell’Unità Italiano to Via del Melarancio. At first sight, everything appears normal, but if you look closely, you can see a coat of arms at the top on the left. Nothing new can be seen here, so what? Examining the previously described heraldic coat of arms, we observe a cabinet with a finger close to the mouth, indicating that it is intended to contain a mouse trap.

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.