Piazza della Signoria

Italian city builders are renowned for effortlessly creating beautiful squares, but it’s an art where the Florentines are generally all thumbs. Only here, in the city’s civic stage, did they achieve a grand, meaningful space, although not by design – in the 13th century the victorious Guelphs knocked down the hated Ghibelline quarter that stood here, and no one wanted to rebuild on land polluted by their memory.

Still, the piazza is an antidote to the stone gullies of the centre, a showcase for the sombre fortress of the Palazzo Vecchio and a lively gathering of some of the best and worst of Florentine sculpture.

A Tumultuous Past

Although the Piazza della Signoria currently serves as Great Aunt Florence’s drawing-room-cum-tourist-overflow-tank, in the old days it saw the public assemblies of the republic, which in Florence meant that the square often degenerated into a battleground for its impossibly inscrutable internecine intramural quarrels.