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Life in the Piazza in Florence in the Early 20th Century

The rich literary output of 19th and 20th century Florence contains numerous references which help us to understand both the old city - now at the limit of its maximum organic and uninterruptedly coherent development - and at the same time, with the sensitivity of our times, the consciousness of that city, troubled by the problematical relationship between a perpetually flourishing heritage and an urgent need to at least glimpse the new and as yet unborn city.

The pages of Aldo Palazzeschi, Giovanni Papini, Vasco Pratolini, Emilio Cecchi and Giorgio Saviane give us a taste of the middle class and largely provincial atmosphere existing at the turn of the century
“The words Florence and 1913,” writes Palazzeschi in 1932, “both seem to belong to the language of prehistory, but they are in fact a sign that something new is about to be born to overturn men and their ideas. This was still the time of men’s knickerbockers laced at the calf, the triumph of moustaches and beards, of starched collars even in summer, of ties fastened with elastic or a robust steel clip.

Most people (including women) considered a man who shaved to be a priest in disguise, a waiter or a coachman. On Sundays, the band in the square sent the maid servants down from Falterona and the marriageable young girls into ecstasy. Respectable people used the omnibus, daredevils and hotheads, the tram.”

Depending on the time of day and the season, the streets and squares were packed with folk selling the most varied of wares, from groceries to household goods: bread flavoured with rosemary (pandiramerino), lupin seeds, peppermints, laces and eyes for shoes, singing crickets, celluloid windmills, flowers, newspapers, timetables and calendars. Typical of other Tuscan cities and villages were the vendors of roast chestnuts (“caldarroste” or “bruciate”).

“The roast chestnut seller at the crossroads under a waxed green umbrella with her handcart, her stove with its great black, glowing mouth and the chestnuts kept warm swathed in blankets. The stance and hopes of the woman, a hand-warmer under her apron [...]. The Swiss yokels down from the mountains, their faces too good and serious among the overly waggish and sly looks of the Florentines, [...] at the open door of their shops, bareheaded or wearing hats with a flat, broad brim, ladled out steaming chestnut-flour polenta [...] and, with rapid gestures and glowering face, began dividing it up with a wire.” The pumpkin seed sellers, ever present and always popular at the entrance to schools and public gardens, cried out: “Chi si diverte a i’sseme?” (“Who wants my seeds?”). But each different type of vendor had his own particular cry: “Oh my pandiramerino! My pandiramerino! With plenty of oil!”; “Humbugs, mint humbugs!” “Freshly made and beautiful!”, etc.

Other common street characters were the charlatan, the carriage hailer, the cabby, the road-sweeper and the hostler (who tended the horses and called the cabs at the ranks in the squares). In 1930, Ottone Rosai wrote: “Each morning at dawn, after a chirruped greeting to the new day, the solitary sparrow sets off from the cathedral bell tower for the cupola of San Lorenzo.


For years now, the hostler in the square has watched that awakening and that flight. In his shirt-sleeves, bare-footed and with his trousers rolled up above the knee, between one curse and the next, he soaks the sponge in the bucket of water, wrings it out, wipes the mud-splashed mudguards and wheels of the carriages and every now and then raises his head, waiting for the sparrow to wake up.” Even the “dazzling blooming of scarlet geraniums” for five or six windows on the second floor “above an old and charming chemist’s shop” at Canto delle Rondini between Via Pietrapiana and Via del Fosso (now Via Verdi) each year represented a topic of discussion for “the whole city” (A. Palazzeschi, 1970).

Life in the city was still the life of a large village. In this large village, Piazzale Michelangelo or the “pleasure park” of the boulevard running down into the city; department stores such as the Bazar Bonaiuti (then Duilio 48) in Via Calzaiuoli or UPIM in Piazza della Repubblica; the cast iron and glass conservatories of the “Orto di Floricultura” near Ponte Rosso; the merry-go-rounds on the meadows of the Zecca or Le Cascine, the “Viewpoint” over Prato and the statues and commemorative monuments in squares both old and new were revealed for what they really were - the toned-down Florentine versions of similar forms of urban evolution in major European cities at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The negatively provincial climate of Florence in the 20th century was most evident in the “heart” of the city - where the cold tidiness of Piazza Vittorio (now Piazza della Repubblica) replaced the old market with its intense, organic and variegated stratification of structures and functional relationships - or in the closed atmosphere of the residential districts as described in Pratolini’s novels.

Thus in 1914, Papini wrote:

“Sunday, six o’clock.
Everyone on surname terms
around the small
and dirty tables of
dull cafés in
Piazza Vittorio
Piazza pain-in-the-neck
of Sunday silliness
Piazza of the cabbies
who never go anywhere
Piazza of the ladies
who smile by the hour
Piazza of the literati
who speak ill of everyone
tasting their ice-creams
under the gaze of all.
Piazza Vittorio
where the king on horseback
stands like a baldachin
of flag waving bronze
[...]

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