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Where every street tells a story A stroll through San Lorenzo
[Gloria Chiarini]
Perhaps the most popular - and therefore interesting - way to enter San Lorenzo is from the Central train station. Rich with history and signs of everyday life it gives you a real feel for the city. As you come into Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia you have the church of Santa Maria Novella and the station behind you. This piazza was once a “spiazzo” or an open space assigned by the Council of the Florentine Republic on December 20, 1244 to the Dominican friar Pietro da Verona, so that the numerous Florentines that flocked to hear his preaching would have a place to meet. The last large public gathering held here was in 1279 when the piazza hosted one of the first, useless, attempts to negotiate a peace between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.
Shortly thereafter, the construction of a new Dominican basilica (the one we still see standing today) began.
Since the church had its own very large piazza, the Dominicans no longer needed this area to address the public and so the “spiazzo” was transformed into a commercial area which hosted various markets: first vegetables, then straw, hay and finally carbon were sold here. The piazza remained a marketplace for centuries, dominated by the beautiful Palazzo dei Cerretani (which is the Railway headquarters today) and the awful obelisk that was erected in 1882 (the Florentines define it as a “craving for obelisks”) and by a Renaissance tabernacle that proudly displays a Madonna and Child by Andrea della Robbia.
This brings us to the corner of Via Sant’Antonino - a medieval street that goes directly to the Central Market - lined with small shops, artisans’ workshops, tabernacles and noble palazzos. Among these there is the characteristic Palazzo dei Cartelloni, which was built by the mathematician Vincenzo Viviani and who inscribed praises to his master Galileo Galilei in two baroque cartelloni (stone scroll-shaped frames) next to the main entrance way and a bust over it. But the first part of Via Sant’Antonino has another story to tell: that of a lovers’ triangle which made the entire city laugh and gossip. It also gave the street its old name Via dell’Amore (the street of love). It is the story on which Niccolò Machiavelli based his play “Mandragola”. In fact it was here that the young and beautiful Lucrezia lived with her husband - the elderly Nicia Calfucci. As he was unable to have children, Nicia confided in an astute procurer named Ligurio; who invented the fable of the mandrake herb. Ligurio told Nicia that the mandrake would make a woman become pregnant but would kill the man who fecundated her. Old gullible Nicia believed him and gave his wife for a night to a predestined victim Callimaco Guadagni.
But as it turned out, it was Nicia himself who fell victim of the plot, since Callimaco was really in cahoots with Ligurio: he had been in love with Lucrezia for some time and had devised the entire scheme in order to be able to meet with her freely and, of course, continue breathing.
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http://www.sanlorenzo.firenze.it/