PALAZZO GIUGNI
Via degl’Alfani.
Bartolomeo Ammannati built this palace for the rich merchant Simone da Firenzuola in 1577. He died soon afterwards, leaving a will forbidding his sons, or their heirs, “to dare, or to presume, either inter vivos, or by last will or testament for any reason whatever, to sell, give away or alienate, the said house.” In case his sons had no children the property was to go to the descendants of his brother Carlo, and failing them, to those of his daughter Virginia, married to Vincenzio Giugni. None of his sons had any children, so in 1640 the palace came into the possession of his Giugni grandchildren. The Giugni claimed descent from Junius Brutus, and were always Guelphs. The first Prior of fifty they gave to Florence was Ugolino, in 1291, and his descendant Bernardo, a man of great ability and consummate prudence, was the chosen spokesman when there was a popular tumult. Messer Galeotto Giugni, a staunch republican, was exiled, and together with his son, murdered at Rome by emissaries of Cosimo I. Vincenzio Giugni, husband of Virginia Firenzuola, became a Senator in 1600, a dignity also conferred on his son Niccolò, who married Cassandra, the last of the noble house of Bandini of Rome. The fine collection of ancient statues belonging to her uncle, Cardinal Ottavio Bandini, was brought to Florence and placed in the garden of the palace. Cinelli gives an account of them, as well as of the pictures in the gallery, in his Bellezze della Città di Firenze.
In 1830 the palace was sold to the Della Porta family, who still own it, and in 1871 it was admirably restored by the architect De Fabris, who scrupulously avoided adding to, or altering, the work of Ammannati. The coat-of-arms of the Firenzuola, a tiger girt with a golden girdle and holding a sickle in his right paw, is on the façade. In the latter half of the last century Palazzo Giugni was much frequented by English visitors to Florence, as Mr. Spence, a popular and well-known personage, inhabited the second floor during the winter.