95 Fun Facts About Florence

Florence is the capital of which Italian region?

Tuscany is run from Florence because the city swallowed its rivals one by one: Pisa was taken in 1406 and Siena, after a long siege, in 1555.

Which Roman is traditionally credited with founding Florence as a colony for his veteran soldiers?

Julius Caesar is credited with planting the colony of Florentia in 59 BC, and its Roman street grid still shows in the straight lanes around Piazza della Repubblica, once the forum.

The Latin name Florentia means what?

The flourishing town is the usual reading of Florentia, a good-luck name of the kind Romans gave new colonies, like Placentia and Valentia, in the hope that the settlement would thrive.

What do Italians call the city of Florence?

Firenze wore down from the Latin Florentia by way of the medieval Fiorenza, while English says Florence because it borrowed the name from French, which stayed closer to the Latin.

Before Rome joined Italy, Florence became the kingdom's capital in 1865, taking over from which city?

Turin gave up the capital under an 1864 deal with France, and dozens of Turinese were killed when troops fired on crowds protesting the move; the king then lived in Palazzo Pitti until Rome took over in 1871.

The Florentine dialect became the basis of standard Italian thanks to Dante and which two other writers?

Petrarch and Boccaccio became the approved models in 1525, when the Venetian scholar Pietro Bembo argued that Italian writers everywhere should copy their Florentine of two centuries earlier.

Which saint stood on Florence's gold florin?

John the Baptist, the city's patron, stood on one face of every florin, and its 3.5 grams of fine gold were so trusted that mints across Europe copied the coin.

Which Medici was the first to control Florence 'from behind the scenes'?

Cosimo the Elder was banished by his rivals in 1433, returned within a year and then steered Florence for three decades through allies and the family bank, rarely holding office himself.

Which three artists enjoyed the patronage of Lorenzo 'the Magnificent' de' Medici?

Michelangelo, Leonardo and Botticelli all moved in Lorenzo's circle: in 1489 he asked the painter Ghirlandaio for his two best pupils, and one of the boys sent to him was the teenage Michelangelo.

What appears on the Medici coat of arms, carved on buildings all over Florence?

Red balls, the palle, sit on the family's gold shield, and they became a rallying cry: after the Pazzi attack of 1478, Medici supporters hunted the plotters through the streets shouting 'Palle, palle!'

The friar Savonarola was hanged and burned in which Florentine square in 1498?

Piazza della Signoria is where Savonarola had staged his Bonfire of the Vanities the year before; a plaque in the paving now marks the spot where he and two fellow friars were hanged and burned.

After expelling the Medici in 1527, Florentines named whom 'King of Florence'?

Jesus Christ was proclaimed the city's king in February 1528, reviving a Savonarolan ceremony, and a plaque with his monogram went up over the door of Palazzo Vecchio; an imperial army still put the Medici back in 1530.

What title did Cosimo I de' Medici receive over the whole region in 1569?

Grand Duke was a rank the pope created for him, and the emperor refused to recognise it, holding that Florence was an imperial fief; the empire gave way only after Cosimo's death, with a diploma for his son Francesco.

Which political handbook did a Florentine ex-diplomat write after his imprisonment and exile in 1513?

The Prince was dedicated to a Medici, a member of the very family that had just had its author arrested, tortured and banished; he wrote it in 1513 while shut out of public life on his farm outside Florence.

What is the formal name of Florence Cathedral, the Duomo begun in 1296?

Santa Maria del Fiore, St Mary of the Flower, was begun to Arnolfo di Cambio's plan and could be consecrated only 140 years later, in 1436, the year Brunelleschi's dome finally closed the roof.

What record does Brunelleschi's cupola on Florence Cathedral still hold?

The largest brick dome ever built went up between 1420 and 1436 with no timber frame to prop it from below: Brunelleschi laid the bricks in a herringbone pattern that locked each new ring in place.

Besides the dome, Brunelleschi is famous for developing which mathematical technique in art?

Linear perspective was proved by experiment: around 1415 he painted the Baptistery as seen from the cathedral door, drilled a peephole through the panel and had viewers check it against the real view with a mirror.

Vasari wrote that Michelangelo judged the Baptistery's east doors fit to stand where?

At the gates of Paradise is the verdict in Vasari's telling; their maker gave the gilded doors 27 years of work, and the originals now sit in the cathedral museum while copies face the weather.

Michelangelo carved his David from a block of marble quarried at which town?

Carrara supplied the block in the 1460s, but two earlier sculptors gave up on it and it lay out in the cathedral yard for decades before the 26-year-old Michelangelo took it on in 1501.

In 1873 the original David was moved from the square outside the Palazzo Vecchio to where?

The Galleria dell'Accademia took the David in to protect it from damage: the statue crept across the city for days in a wheeled wooden crate, then waited years in its box while a hall was built to hold it.

Vasari's building for Cosimo I, begun in 1560 and later a gallery, originally served as what?

Government offices are what the name still says: uffizi means 'offices', built to put Cosimo I's magistrates under one roof, and the top floor was turned into a Medici gallery only in 1581.

Which Botticelli painting in the Uffizi did climate protesters glue images to in February 2024?

The Birth of Venus had photographs of the region's 2023 floods stuck across its protective glass by two Ultima Generazione activists; the group had glued their own hands to the glass over Primavera in 2022.

The Vasari Corridor was built in 1565 so that Cosimo I could do what?

Walk between his palaces unseen is what it allowed: the passage runs from Palazzo Vecchio through the Uffizi and over the shops of the Ponte Vecchio to Palazzo Pitti, and was rushed up for his son's wedding.

Which trade did the Medici drive off the Ponte Vecchio, handing its shops to goldsmiths?

Butchers had used the bridge to tip their scraps into the river, and the smell rising to the Medici corridor overhead got them evicted in the late 1500s; goldsmiths and jewellers have held the shops ever since.

Why is the Ponte Vecchio the only medieval bridge left in Florence?

The retreating Germans spared it in 1944 while blowing up every other bridge in Florence, demolishing the buildings at each end of the Ponte Vecchio instead; the present bridge dates from about 1345.

Who fought German troops street by street to free central Florence on 11 August 1944?

Italian partisans rose at dawn on 11 August 1944, called out by the bell of Palazzo Vecchio, a week after South African and New Zealand troops had reached the far bank of the river.

Which Florence-born director made a 1966 documentary about the flood that wrecked his home city?

Franco Zeffirelli rushed out a documentary within a month of the flood, with Richard Burton narrating, and the film is said to have raised some $20 million for the city.

What were the volunteers who rescued art after the 1966 flood nicknamed?

Mud Angels was a journalist's name for the young volunteers who poured in from Italy and abroad, and the rescue pushed restorers to devise new conservation methods and found new laboratories.

Palazzo Vecchio's 94-metre campanile is off-centre because its architect built it on top of what?

An older tower called 'the Cow' was kept as the base of the new one rather than pulled down, and a cramped cell inside it, the Alberghetto, later held Savonarola before his execution.

The church nicknamed the Temple of the Italian Glories holds the tombs of Michelangelo, Galileo and whom?

Machiavelli waited 260 years for his monument there: he died in 1527, and the marble tomb with its Latin tribute was carved by Innocenzo Spinazzi only in 1787.

Stendhal syndrome is named for the author's 1817 visit to which Florentine church?

Santa Croce left Stendhal with palpitations and afraid of falling as he walked out; a Florentine psychiatrist, Graziella Magherini, later gave the syndrome his name after seeing over a hundred dazed tourists.

Dante, banished from Florence in 1302, lies buried in which city?

Ravenna has refused every Florentine request to return his bones, once even walling them up to hide them, so the tomb Florence built for its exiled poet in 1829 has stood empty ever since.

Which Dan Brown thriller opens with Robert Langdon waking up in a Florence hospital?

Inferno has Langdon come round with a head wound and no memory of the past few days, then run from an assassin through the city while he works out clues drawn from the medieval poem the book is named after.

What does each calcio storico team represent?

A city quarter fields each side of 27 in its own colour, and the rules let players punch, tackle and wrestle their opponents to the ground.

Which two musical inventions are credited to Florence?

Opera and the piano both came out of Medici Florence: opera from a circle of scholars trying to revive sung Greek drama in the 1590s, the piano from the court's instrument maker Bartolomeo Cristofori around 1700.

Bistecca alla fiorentina is a thick T-bone traditionally cut from which breed of cattle?

Chianina cattle, the largest breed in the world, were kept for more than two thousand years mainly as draught animals, and only in modern times came to be raised chiefly for beef.

Which fashion house has been based in Florence since 1928?

Salvatore Ferragamo settled in Florence on his return from Hollywood in the late 1920s and the shoemaker has been headquartered there since, in the medieval Palazzo Spini Feroni that he bought in 1938.

Fiorentina football club is nicknamed the Viola because of what?

Its purple colours replaced red and white at the end of the 1920s; a fond legend blames shirts that came out of the wash the wrong colour, though the founder, Luigi Ridolfi, is also credited with choosing the shade.

The Boboli Gardens behind the Palazzo Pitti were laid out for whom?

Eleonora di Toledo, Cosimo I's wife, was a keen businesswoman who paid for the Pitti Palace in 1549 and had the hill behind it laid out as a garden that nobody outside the family was allowed to enter.

The Guelphs of medieval Florence backed the pope against the Ghibellines, who supported which ruler?

The Holy Roman Emperor's party was beaten in Florence by the late 1200s, but the winning Guelphs promptly split into Blacks and Whites, and that second feud is the one that sent the city's greatest poet into exile.

The Revolt of the Ciompi in 1378 was an uprising by whom?

The Ciompi were the wool combers and carders, unguilded labourers of the cloth trade, who seized the Signoria in the summer of 1378 and briefly won guilds of their own before the oligarchy crushed them.

Lampredotto, the filling of Florence's classic street-food sandwich, comes from which part of a cow?

The stomach, to be exact the cow's fourth, is simmered and sold in rolls from kiosks all over the city; its name comes from the lamprey, an eel-like fish once common in the local river.

Which explorer studied a Florentine astronomer's 1474 letter and map before crossing the Atlantic?

Christopher Columbus copied Paolo Toscanelli's letter into one of his own books; the Florentine argued that the quickest way to Asia lay west, across an ocean he made far narrower than it is.

In 2016 Florence rejected which chain's bid to open a branch in Piazza del Duomo?

Florence refused McDonald's a site on Piazza del Duomo in 2016 under a new rule requiring new food businesses in the historic centre to use mostly local products; the chain sued the city for about €18 million.

Which ruler conquered Florence in 774 and placed it in a march governed from Lucca?

Charlemagne took Florence in 774 as he overthrew the Lombard kingdom, and for two centuries the town answered to Lucca, until Margrave Hugh turned the tables around 1000 by moving his court to Florence.

The Medici cousins who retook Florence in 1512 later became which two popes?

Leo X and Clement VII were the cousins Giovanni and Giulio de' Medici: Giovanni rode back into Florence behind Spanish troops in 1512 and was elected pope within months, putting city and papacy in one family's hands.

Which book by a Florentine opens with young people fleeing the Black Death of 1348 for a hillside villa?

The Decameron begins with the plague that more than halved Florence's population, then follows seven women and three men who pass ten days in the hills telling one another a hundred stories.

Florence's main railway station, a 1930s modernist landmark, takes its name from which church beside it?

Santa Maria Novella's Gothic church stands just across the square, so Giovanni Michelucci's team faced their strikingly modern 1934 station in pietra forte, the hard local sandstone, to answer it.

What did Mayor Dario Nardella start doing to church steps in 2017 to deter picnicking tourists?

Spraying them with water was his answer to visitors who, in his words, sit down on church steps, eat their food and leave rubbish strewn on them; the hosing began in June 2017.

Giotto's bell tower in Florence was finished in 1359 without which planned feature?

A pointed spire was dropped by Francesco Talenti, the third architect on the job, which is why the tower stops flat at 84.7 metres instead of the 120 or so that Giotto had drawn.

Florentines once believed the Baptistery began as a Roman temple to which god?

Medieval chroniclers such as Villani held that the Baptistery had been a temple of Mars, the Roman city's protector; excavations instead found a Roman house beneath it, and the building dates from the 11th and 12th centuries.

Who won the famous 1401 competition to make new bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery?

Lorenzo Ghiberti was a goldsmith of 21 when he beat six rivals, with Brunelleschi the runner-up; the two men's trial panels of the Sacrifice of Isaac still hang side by side in the Bargello.

Who designed the upper façade of Santa Maria Novella, completed in 1470?

Leon Battista Alberti was hired by the wool merchant Giovanni Rucellai, who had his own name carved in giant Latin letters across the top of the friars' church, with the date 1470.

The pharmacy's oldest scent, Acqua della Regina, was made in 1533 for whose wedding?

Catherine de' Medici took the scent to France on marrying the future Henry II in 1533; the friars' perfumer Renato Bianco followed her to Paris, where he was known as René le Florentin.

Before it became a museum in 1865, what was the Bargello?

Police headquarters and prison is what the name records: in 1574 the Medici installed the bargello, the city's chief of police, in the old magistrates' palace, where a Pazzi plotter had been hanged in 1479.

Donatello's bronze David in the Bargello is celebrated as the first what since antiquity?

Freestanding nude male statue: nothing like it had been made for a thousand years, and it stood in the Medici palace courtyard until the family was driven out in 1494, when the republic carried it off to the town hall.

The New Sacristy at San Lorenzo holds Medici tombs carved with personifications of what?

Michelangelo carved the four times of day, Night and Day, Dawn and Dusk, to recline on the tombs of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, and Giuliano, Duke of Nemours; the tomb meant for the Magnificent was never completed.

Michelangelo's Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo was commissioned by a Medici pope to house what?

The family's manuscripts waited decades for their room to be finished: Michelangelo left Florence for good in 1534, and the famous staircase was built only in 1559, from a clay model he sent from Rome.

Brunelleschi's Ospedale degli Innocenti, opened in 1445, was built as what?

A foundling hospital run by the silk guild, it took in babies left in a basin under the portico, later replaced by a small opening through which a child could be passed inside, in use until 1875.

Orsanmichele, ringed by guild statues, was built in the 1330s to serve as what?

A grain market and granary, with the corn stored upstairs, it stood on the old kitchen garden of San Michele; a painting of the Madonna drew so many worshippers that by about 1400 the arcades were walled in as a church.

Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes in Palazzo Medici's chapel show which biblical procession?

The Journey of the Magi winds across almost every wall of the chapel, painted around 1459 for the Medici, and Gozzoli slipped his own portrait into the crowd that follows the kings.

What nickname do Florentines give Ammannati's marble Neptune outside Palazzo Vecchio?

Il Biancone, 'the big white one', was never a compliment: Florentines found the pale giant clumsy, and an old rhyme teases Ammannati for the fine block of marble he wasted on it.

The Loggia dei Lanzi is usually said to take its name from what?

German mercenary pikemen, the Landsknechte or lanzichenecchi, served as Cosimo I's bodyguard and were quartered under its arches; the roof was later made into a terrace for watching ceremonies in the square.

Cellini's bronze Perseus in the Loggia dei Lanzi holds up whose severed head?

Medusa's head hangs from his raised hand while her body lies under his feet; Cellini told the story of the casting in his memoirs and hid his own face on the back of Perseus's helmet.

What do visitors do to the bronze boar Il Porcellino to ensure they return to Florence?

Rub its snout and you will come back, the custom says, and a coin dropped from the boar's jaws through the grating brings luck; so many hands wore the bronze down that the one in the market is now a copy.

Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici left her family's art to the state on what condition?

None of it could leave the city, she insisted in her Family Pact of 1737 with the incoming Lorraine rulers, which is why the Medici collections still fill the Uffizi and the Pitti today.

By tradition, a Florentine count created the Negroni by swapping his Americano's soda water for what?

Gin replaced the soda water, the usual story goes, when Count Camillo Negroni asked the barman at Florence's Caffè Casoni to stiffen his Americano; accounts differ on which barman mixed it.

Bernardo Buontalenti, architect to the Medici court, is credited by some with inventing an early form of which treat?

Gelato is credited to him in several accounts, which have him freezing a mix of milk, egg, honey and wine for the Medici court around 1565, though Sicily claims the invention too.

The Star of David on the façade of Florence's great Franciscan basilica is traditionally explained how?

Its architect was Jewish, and the star is said to be Niccolò Matas's quiet tribute to his faith, though nothing documents it; fourteen years after his death he was laid to rest under the church's own threshold.

Which painter, by tradition Giotto's teacher, made the Crucifix ruined in the 1966 flood?

Cimabue's Crucifix, nearly four and a half metres tall, went under the floodwater, which tore away much of the painted surface; even after the most careful restoration, large parts of the figure are simply gone.

Whose frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel, among them The Tribute Money, earned it the name 'Sistine Chapel of the early Renaissance'?

Masaccio was in his mid-twenties when he painted them and dead at 26, leaving the walls unfinished until Filippino Lippi completed the cycle about fifty years later.

Vasari's fresco in Palazzo Vecchio bears the words 'Cerca trova', read by some as a clue to which lost Leonardo battle scene?

The Battle of Anghiari was abandoned in 1505 when an experimental technique failed on the wall; Vasari later frescoed the hall, and the words on his painted flag, 'he who seeks, finds', have kept searchers probing behind it.

Which Florence-born inventor, a rival claimant to Bell's telephone, began with a speaking tube at the Teatro della Pergola?

Antonio Meucci rigged the tube in 1834 so the stage crew could talk to each other, later built a telephone in New York and filed a notice of it in 1871, five years before Bell's patent; the US House honoured his work in 2002.

Which Florence-born journalist called Khomeini a tyrant and shed her chador mid-interview?

Oriana Fallaci, born in Florence in 1929, tore off her chador during her 1979 interview with Khomeini after calling him a tyrant; Kissinger called his own interview with her the most disastrous conversation he ever had with the press.

Which mayor of Florence (2009-14) went straight from city hall to prime minister of Italy?

Matteo Renzi was nicknamed 'the Scrapper' for vowing to junk Italy's old political guard; in February 2014 he replaced his own party colleague Enrico Letta and became, at 39, the youngest prime minister the country had had.

In 1487 Lorenzo de' Medici was presented with a giraffe by the sultan of which land?

The Mamluk sultan of Egypt, Qaitbay, sent the giraffe with an embassy in 1487; Lorenzo promised it to Anne of France as a diplomatic sweetener, but the animal died in Florence before it could travel.

Santa Maria Nuova hospital, founded in 1288, was endowed by whose father?

Dante's Beatrice is usually identified as Bice, daughter of the banker Folco Portinari, who founded the hospital in 1288, by tradition at the urging of the family's servant Monna Tessa.

Fra Angelico frescoed the cells of which Florentine convent, later home to Savonarola?

San Marco was rebuilt for its friars with Medici money, some 40,000 florins by Vasari's count; half a century later its prior was Savonarola, who came to dominate Florence once that same family had been driven out.

Michelangelo is said to have carved the Pietà now in Florence's cathedral museum for what purpose?

His own tomb was the plan, and the hooded Nicodemus holding Christ is taken to be a self-portrait; after years of work he turned on the marble and broke it, and Christ's left leg is still missing.

The Marzocco, Florence's heraldic lion, rests a paw on a shield bearing what?

The fleur-de-lis, Florence's red lily, sits on the shield under the lion's paw; real lions were kept at public expense until 1771, and Pisan prisoners of war were made to kiss the stone one in 1364.

Ponte Santa Trinita's flattened spans make it the oldest bridge of which type?

Ammannati's Ponte Santa Trinita of 1569 is regarded as the oldest elliptic arch bridge in the world; rebuilt stone by stone after the war, it regained the head of its statue of Spring, fished from the river in 1961.

In Forster's A Room with a View, what do Lucy and George witness in a Florentine square?

Lucy sees a murder, an Italian stabbed in a quarrel over money in the square, and faints; George catches her and throws her blood-spattered photographs into the river, and the 1908 novel ends with the couple back in Florence.

Which fictional killer hides in Florence as the library curator 'Dr Fell' in a 2001 film?

Hannibal Lecter enjoys his Florentine cover until a local inspector recognises him and tries to sell him to a vengeful victim; Lecter disembowels the policeman and hangs him from a balcony of Palazzo Vecchio.

In Assassin's Creed II, which artist becomes Ezio's friend and ally?

Leonardo da Vinci befriends Ezio in Assassin's Creed II, decoding codex pages and building his hidden blades and other gadgets; one mission has Ezio fly Leonardo's flying machine over Venice.

The Accademia della Crusca, the oldest linguistic academy, takes its name from what?

Crusca means bran: the academy, founded in 1583, set out to sift the good flour of the language from the bran, and its Vocabolario of 1612 became the model for Europe's national dictionaries.

Which engineer, later builder of the Vatican's audience hall, designed Fiorentina's Stadio Artemio Franchi?

Pier Luigi Nervi built it in reinforced concrete; in October 1954 a match there stopped dead while some 10,000 people watched strange objects cross the sky, a much-retold UFO sighting.

Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497 was staged on which day?

Shrove Tuesday, the last day of Carnival, was the point: Savonarola swapped the usual revels for a pyre of cosmetics, mirrors, books and art in the main square, and staged another the following year.

Botticelli is buried in the church of Ognissanti near which woman, reputedly his muse?

Simonetta Vespucci, the beauty of her day, died in 1476 aged about 22; the tale that he asked to lie at her feet is the romantic version, but Ognissanti was simply his own parish church, where his family was buried too.

Under Peter Leopold, the state ruled from Florence became the first in modern times to abolish what in 1786?

The death penalty went, along with torture, in his penal code of 30 November 1786, and the gallows and instruments of torture were publicly burned; the region now keeps the date as its annual holiday.

Lorenzino de' Medici lured his cousin, Florence's first duke, to his death in 1537 by promising what?

A tryst with a widow famed for her beauty was the bait; the duke waited alone and unarmed, bit off part of his killer's finger in the struggle, and Lorenzino fled to Venice, where he was killed in turn in 1548.

What did besieged Florentines stage on 17 February 1530 to show the emperor's army they were not afraid?

A football match was the besieged city's show of indifference to the troops camped outside, and today's calcio storico is modelled on that game; Florence still had to surrender six months later.

Which part of Florence Cathedral was only added in the 1880s?

The marble façade is Emilio De Fabris's neo-Gothic design, finished in 1887; the unfinished medieval front had been pulled down three centuries earlier as out of fashion, and no permanent one replaced it.

The 1478 Pazzi conspiracy struck at the Medici brothers where?

The conspirators stabbed the brothers during Mass in the cathedral on 26 April 1478; Giuliano died, Lorenzo escaped into the sacristy, and Archbishop Salviati was hanged from the windows of Palazzo Vecchio.

Guccio Gucci opened his first Florence shop in 1921 after working as a bellhop where?

Guccio Gucci worked as a bellhop at the Savoy Hotel, London, where the luggage of wealthy guests inspired him; back in Florence he opened a leather-goods shop on Via della Vigna Nuova in 1921.

Pinocchio's creator Carlo Lorenzini, a Florentine, took his pen name Collodi from what?

His mother's home town was Collodi, a village near Pescia where he spent most of his childhood; Pinocchio first ran as a weekly serial called The Story of a Puppet, in one of Italy's earliest children's magazines.