Palazzo Davanzati

This delightful museum offers an idea of what day-to-day life was like inside these sombre palaces some 600 years ago. Built in the mid-14th century for the Davizzi family, the house was purchased by merchant and historian Bernardo Davanzati in 1578 and stayed in the family until it was purchased in 1904 by antique dealer Elia Volpi (rival to Stefano Bardini) who filled it with period furnishings. In 1951 it passed to the Italian State, which opened as a museum in 1956 as the best-preserved medieval–Renaissance house in Florence.

The façade is basically as it was in the 16th-century, when Bernardo Davanzati combined two medieval houses, stuck on a new facade and added fifth-floor loggia to replace the battlements of yore – in the rough-and-tumble 14th century, a man’s home literally had to be a castle. But it was also a showroom for his prosperity, and by the standards of the day, the dwellers of this huge palace were multi-millionaires.

Ground Floor