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Florentine palaces & their stories

Chapter 33: PALAZZO GIANFIGLIAZZI Via Tornabuoni. No. 1.
By Janet Ross
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About This Book

A room-by-room, façade-by-façade survey of Florence’s principal palaces that combines architectural description with the genealogies, anecdotes, and historical events tied to each house. Entries describe towers, courtyards, doorways, and decorative programs while noting artists, commissions, restorations, and alterations; many chapters situate buildings within civic and familial rivalries that shaped the city. Illustrated plates and guidebook-style notes support archival detail and travelerly observation, producing a cumulative portrait of urban development, stylistic change, and the social networks embedded in Florence’s built heritage.

The palace, or rather the palaces, of the great family of the Gianfigliazzi faced the Ponte a Sta. Trinita at the corner of the Lung’Arno Corsini and the Via Tornabuoni. As Guelphs they were expelled the city after the battle of Montaperti in 1260, but returned, and three of them signed the famous peace of 1280. Eight years later their palaces were nearly destroyed by the terrible flood which did so much damage in Florence. The palaces Nos. 2 and 4 on the Lung’Arno Corsini also belonged to them; in the former, with the lion of the Gianfigliazzi carved by Desiderio da Settignano in the coat of arms on the façade, the great poet Alfieri lived for some time, and there he died.

At the beginning of the XVth century they bought from the Fastelli the palace adjoining the church of Sta. Trinita, with a tower which had been built by the Ruggerini, a Guelph family who were ruined in 1260. The arms of the three different owners are still on the façade. The loggia of the Gianfigliazzi, on the opposite side of the church at the corner of the Via di Parione, was only closed and turned into a shop in 1732.

The Gianfigliazzi descend from a Giovanni son of Azzo (Gianni figlio d’Azzo), who signed a convention with Siena in 1201. Two of the family sat in the Council of Elders in 1278 and 1279; a few years later they were excluded from office as nobles and their name only appears again among the magistrates of the city after the departure of the tyrant Duke of Athens. Geri de’ Gianfigliazzi was a poet and a friend of Petrarch; Rinaldo, sent as Commissary of War against Visconti, was created a Count of the Holy Roman Empire by the Emperor Robert in 1402; and Bongianni, another gallant soldier, was publicly knighted by the Signoria in 1467 and died at the head of his troops under the walls of Pietrasanta. His son Jacopo was one of the twelve citizens named by Clement VII. to “reform” the State and elect Alessandro de’ Medici absolute ruler of Florence. Several of the family were Senators under the Medici, until the family became extinct in 1764.