Exclusive Home in Florence

Florence is universally recognised as a city of art, thanks to its incalculable storehouse of works, which transform the city’s streets and plazas into a vibrant open-air museum. The heart of Florence is Piazza della Signoria, dominated by the towering Palazzo Vecchio and the Galleria degli Uffizi. Just a few steps away is the Cathedral, where Brunelleschi’s superb cathedral is accompanied by Giotto’s bell tower and the Baptistery of St. John, with its celebrated bronze doors. The River Arno, which runs through the middle of the city, has played a role in Florentine history on a par with that of the city’s residents. Over the centuries, the people of Florence have maintained a love-hate relationship with the Arno, which has provided the city with both commercial advantage and disastrous floods. The most famous of the bridges crossing the river, the Ponte Vecchio, is adorned with jewellers shops housed in small cabins attached to the bridge, a construction technique found nowhere else in the world. Carrying Vasari’s noble corridor from one bank to the other, the Ponte Vecchio was also the only Florentine bridge to make it through the Second World War without suffering any damage.

In addition to the Uffizi, Florence has other museums that would be the chief artistic attraction in almost any other large city, while the Florentines can also boast that they possess the most striking of both female and male beauty in art: Botticelli’s Venus and Michelangelo’s David. One of the UNESCO’s treasures of the human heritage, the magnificence of Florence’s historic core can also be admired from Forte Belvedere, the Piazzale Michelangelo and the Fiesole Hill, which offers one of the most striking views of the Arno Valley. The left bank of the Arno, or the “Oltrarno”, is an area that still provides a feel, amidst its centuries-old crafts shops, of the Florence of yesteryear, as described by Vasco Pratolini and Marcello Vannucci. But there are countless other sites tied to literary references: from the neighbourhoods of the towered homes that inspired the verses of Dante Alighieri to the serene calm of the Medici villas, where the neo-platonic academy of Lorenzo the Magnificent often met, not to mention the theatres of the Pergola zone and the Boboli Garden.