Palazzo Fenzi: A Baroque Urban Palace in Florence
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Italy
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Italian, Kingdom of Sardinia
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Elite Residence
On this page17 sections
History
Palazzo Fenzi, also known as Palazzo Fenzi-Marucelli, is a Baroque urban palace in Florence, Italy, commissioned for the Castelli family and begun in 1628–1630. Gherardo Silvani is generally identified as its architect, although Ferdinando Ruggieri attributed the building to Giulio Parigi, who certainly supplied a design for one of its coats of arms. The palace stands at Via San Gallo 10 in the historic centre of the city.
Castelli and Marucelli ownership
The Castelli family assembled the property gradually, acquiring eleven small houses between 1618 and 1638. According to Federico Fantozzi, one of these had previously belonged to Benedetto da Maiano. The resulting residence passed to the Marucelli family in 1659, following the extinction of the Castelli line.
During the second half of the seventeenth century, the Marucelli enlarged the palace. Two lower side wings were added in connection with the marriage of Giuseppe Marucelli and Maria Francesca di Palla Rucellai in 1672. The building reached its greatest prosperity in the eighteenth century, when its rooms received extensive painted and stucco decoration.
The library and eighteenth-century prosperity
In 1748, a separate building was begun behind the palace on land whose gardens extended towards Via Larga, now Via Camillo Cavour. Alessandro Dori designed it to house Francesco Marucelli’s library. It opened to the public in 1752 and was described as Florence’s first public institution of this kind.
The palace interiors were also embellished during this period. Ground-floor rooms received frescoes, including works by Sebastiano Ricci from 1706–1707. Giovanni Battista Ciceri supplied stucco decoration for the chapel, and the ground-floor alcove was decorated as part of the same phase of eighteenth-century refinement.
The Brunaccini and Fenzi periods
The Brunaccini family acquired Palazzo Fenzi in 1783. In 1829 it passed to Emanuele Fenzi, a prominent banker whose wealth also came from the tobacco trade. Fenzi helped build the Leopolda railway, and his family remodelled the interiors while also partially altering the facade.
Giuseppe Martelli designed a new Corinthian cornice in 1834, with stone ornament by Luigi Giovannozzi. Martelli also directed improvements to the interiors, including the ballroom suite and its furnishings, completed in 1840. Further work followed in 1860. The monumental staircase probably belongs to this campaign, although it is often attributed to Martelli.
Bank, cultural institute, and university
In 1890, a serious accident on the Florence–Fiesole tramway caused several deaths and substantial compensation costs. The service had been financed by the Fenzi family and inaugurated only a few days earlier. The Fenzi bank then entered a crisis that was worsened by the theft of cash by a dishonest cashier. That year, the family palace was acquired by the Banca Nazionale Toscana.
In 1891, Riccardo Mazzanti remodelled the building for banking use. The courtyard was covered and converted into a banking operations hall. From 1908 to 1912, the palace housed the Institut français de Florence, the first cultural institute founded by France abroad.
The University of Florence acquired the complex in 1971. From 1975 onward, extensive restoration addressed the deterioration of the stone elements and the fall of parts of the cornice. The work recovered the building’s seventeenth-century character and restored eighteenth-century features inside. Palazzo Fenzi is now owned by the university and houses the Department of History, Archaeology, Geography, Art and Performance, known as SAGAS.
Remains
Facade and exterior features
The three-level facade is arranged in seven bays and retains the essential design associated with Gherardo Silvani despite later changes. On the ground floor, kneeling windows have triangular pediments. The first-floor windows carry curved pediments resting on the cornice, while the upper level has almost square windows with straight architectural frames.
A large arched portal dominates the centre of the facade, with a small balcony above it. The balcony rests on corbels decorated with grotesque satyr figures set within elaborate scrollwork. The portal sculpture is attributed to Raffaello Curradi and was dated to 1634 by Filippo Baldinucci. An earlier description called the corbels harpies made by Ferrucci. The ground-floor window grilles rest on bronze turtles.
Coats of arms and entrance emblems
The central upper window is crowned by the Fenzi coat of arms. It shows a left hand holding a garden lily beneath an Anjou chief, a heraldic band at the top of a shield. This emblem replaced an earlier Castelli coat of arms made by Pietro Paolo Anderlini after a design by Giulio Parigi.
An oval emblem held by two griffins forms the key element of the entrance arch. It depicts a locomotive between Florence Cathedral and the Fanale Tower of Livorno, referring to Fenzi economic interests and the Florence–Livorno railway. The motto “In Labore Virtus” accompanies the design, which replaced an earlier double-headed eagle and is reportedly based on a design by Giuseppe Poggi. The carriage entrance in the left wing retains the Castelli arms, showing a boat floating on the sea beneath an eight-pointed star.
Ground-floor decoration
Garden room and Youth at the Crossroads
Ground-floor rooms decorated in 1706–1707 preserve a rich combination of painting and stucco. In the room facing the inner garden, the ceiling represents the defeat of Mars and the beginning of the Golden Age. Large stucco Tritons and Nereids by Giovan Martino Portogalli occupy the corners, while four seventeenth-century paintings with idyllic and pastoral subjects hang in richly gilded frames.
The adjoining room contains the scene known as Youth at the Crossroads, possibly painted by Marco Ricci. The Alcove Room is divided into two areas by a lowered arch, and its first section has Rococo decoration.
Room of Punished Love and Hercules Room
The centrally placed Room of Punished Love, perhaps once an antechamber, contains Sebastiano Ricci’s painting of Punished Love within the ceiling stucco. The next room has a ceiling painting showing the Triumph of Wisdom and the Arts over Ignorance.
The Hercules Room presents scenes from the myth of Hercules across its walls. Giuseppe Tonelli joined these scenes with trompe-l’oeil architectural framing, an illusion of three-dimensional construction painted on a flat surface. This form of decoration, known as quadrature, also appears elsewhere in the interiors, alongside paintings by Antonio Puglieschi and further work by Tonelli.
Staircase and principal floor
Marble staircase
A monumental marble staircase rises from the atrium to the piano nobile, the palace’s principal ceremonial floor. Mariano Falcini designed it in 1860 in the Neoclassical style, probably as part of the interior works entrusted to him during that year.
Ballroom and later rooms
The principal floor contains less opulent but valuable rooms substantially shaped by Giuseppe Martelli’s renovations around 1860. The large ballroom, now the Aula Magna, a formal university hall, has friezes of mythological subjects painted in grisaille by Antonio Marini. Grisaille uses shades of gray to imitate relief sculpture.
Almost all the other rooms on this floor have coffered ceilings with painted stucco showing flowers, fruit, mythological scenes, and allegories in a nineteenth-century manner. The second floor also preserves frescoes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Surviving frescoes and special interiors
Seventeenth-century frescoes
In a room on the north side of the courtyard, plaster removal revealed remains of seventeenth-century frescoes attributed to Cosimo Ulivelli. They probably formed part of a larger decorative cycle in a former salon, whose interior has since been extensively changed by its division into professors’ studies.
Venetian Bathroom Room
The small Venetian Bathroom Room has Neo-Gothic decoration designed to imitate white marble against a blue background. Its treatment forms a distinct later interior within the palace’s sequence of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century rooms.
