Cittadella Nuova: The Florentine Fortress and Public Garden of Pisa
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.4
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Italy
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Republic of Florence, Republic of Pisa
- Site type
- Military
- Remains
- Fort
On this page14 sections
History
Cittadella Nuova is a Florentine fortress in Pisa, Italy, built from 1440 during the first period of Florentine rule and later transformed into the public garden known as Giardino Scotto. Its construction followed Florence’s conquest of Pisa in 1406, when the earlier parish of Sant’Andrea and San Vincenzo, together with houses, workshops, a hospital, and a monastery, were destroyed to clear the site. The fortress formed part of Florence’s military system for controlling Pisa and guarded important crossings of the Arno.
Before the Florentine fortress
Before the Roman period, the area lay completely beneath the Arno and could not support settlement. During the Roman period, an unidentified structure, perhaps a landing place, was built there. Its floor of cocciopesto, a durable mixture of lime mortar and crushed pottery or brick, was later destroyed during the Early Middle Ages.
After a period of abandonment, a church dedicated to Sant’Andrea and San Vincenzo was built at the end of the eleventh century. It became the center of a parish and a prosperous neighborhood. An embankment approximately 2.50 metres high was created for the complex, helping both to raise the buildings and to contain the Arno.
Between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the district became one of the wealthiest parts of Pisa. It included a hospital, a monastery, homes for about 90 families, and many workshops, particularly those of potters. The area was called Baractularia, while Baractularii, originally referring to Pisan ceramic producers, later came to denote other pottery makers as well.
The neighborhood also supported a permanent bell-founders’ workshop. Active from 1330, it is associated through contemporary documents and a ceramic fragment bearing a bell and the name Benciveni with Andrea Benciveni and his family. Its permanent character was unusual because medieval bell founders were generally itinerant craftsmen. The workshop district was dismantled during the 1430s to prepare for the Florentine fortress, removing the church, homes, workshops, and other buildings.
Construction and military use
Construction of the fortress began in 1440 and continued during the period from 1440 to 1470. It was called Cittadella Nuova, or New Citadel, to distinguish it from the older Cittadella Vecchia on the seaward side of Pisa. The new stronghold controlled the Ponte della Spina, later known as the Ponte della Fortezza, and the Ponte a Mare. Its military purpose continued until the eighteenth century.
The Pisans partially destroyed the original fortress during their revolt of 1495. Florence reconquered Pisa in 1509, after which Giuliano da Sangallo and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Renaissance architects associated with military and civic construction, modified the stronghold. The post-conquest arrangement became known as Cittadella Nuova. Sixteenth-century work restructured the area south of the bastion of the cistern, while in the seventeenth century the eastern curtain wall was rebuilt and a brick path was laid inside the cistern bastion. These interventions concentrated on the fortress’s structural and practical needs.
Demilitarization and the Scotto garden
The fortress was demilitarized in 1781. The bastion began to be demolished, and the property was offered for sale. The Chiesa family acquired it and constructed the first two floors of what became Palazzo Scotto between 1785 and 1787. After Pietro Chiesa died in 1792, his widow sold the property to Domenico Scotto. Scotto completed the upper floor, commissioned frescoes from Luigi Ademollo in the early nineteenth century, and developed a garden within the former fortress.
Giovanni Caluri designed an extensive garden for Scotto in the early nineteenth century. A later tradition claimed that the garden’s large plane tree had been planted during a theatrical performance by Carlo Goldoni, the eighteenth-century Italian playwright. The story is chronologically impossible, since Goldoni died before the Scotto family acquired the property.
Public garden, destruction, and recovery
Palazzo Scotto eventually ceased to be a residence and became the headquarters of the Regia Questura, the royal-era police headquarters. In 1934, the Cassa di Risparmio di Pisa purchased the large garden inside the fortress enclosure and donated it to the people of Pisa. From the 1930s onward, the space served as a municipal public garden for exhibitions, theatrical performances, concerts, and summer open-air cinema.
An eastern building beside Palazzo Scotto was erected at the beginning of the 1930s. It was demolished during the construction of Lungarno Fibonacci, and rubble covered the garden’s original flowerbed. In August 1943, an Allied bombing raid on Pisa partially destroyed Palazzo Scotto, including its eastern section, perimeter wall, attached masonry, and the rooms enclosed by those structures.
After the Second World War, the surviving part of the palace was adapted for the Nuovi Laboratori Farma Biagini pharmaceutical plant. The plant closed permanently in the late 1980s. The area was then abandoned, used as a dump, and gradually covered by spontaneous vegetation. Recovery began in the 2000s through building and archaeological projects that investigated the site’s long development. The garden was largely restored and its furnishings renewed in 2008. Cittadella Nuova is owned by the Municipality of Pisa, protected as an Italian cultural property, and continues to function as a public park.
Remains
The site occupies the south bank of the Arno on Lungarno Fibonacci, between Ponte della Vittoria and Ponte della Fortezza, at the opposite end of Pisa’s walls from the older seaward citadel. The surviving and restored complex combines parts of the fortress, Palazzo Scotto, archaeological remains of the earlier parish district, entrances and bridges, internal and external walkways, stairways, a riverside turret, arched passages along the Arno, and a natural amphitheater. The garden occupies the center of the former fortified enclosure.
Fortifications and palace grounds
Citadel strongholds
The fifteenth-century fortress was constructed largely with reused materials. Its defenses centered on two strongholds. To the south stood the Rocca di San Marco, a quadrangular fortification with a large square tower and three angular projections. To the north was a fort enclosed by high walls and topped by a circular tower. A broad fortified area lay between them, containing a church dedicated to Sant’Andrea and service buildings. A moat surrounded the whole citadel, with access provided by a drawbridge.
After the changes made following the Florentine reconquest, the two fortifications were linked by a single bastion, a projecting part of a fortification designed to protect adjacent walls with flanking fire. The northern Bastion of the Cistern was arranged around an open guardhouse square. It included a cistern, the remains of a fifteenth-century circular tower, a long residential building for the cellarer, innkeeper, and some soldiers, an inn, and a casemate, a protected artillery chamber. Brick curtain walls and vertical marble bands gave parts of the fortress details shared with the Fortezza Vecchia at Livorno.
Tower and garden
The Torre Sant’Antonio, now at the entrance to Giardino Scotto and incorporated into the southern walls, began as the bell tower of Sant’Andrea. Other surviving elements include the eastern and western entrances, access bridges, walkways, stairways, a riverside turret, and arched passages beside the Arno. A plaque is visible on the outer eastern bastion.
The garden’s original arrangement included a large rectangular flowerbed with chamfered corners, built of brick. A washhouse occupied the ground floor of Palazzo Scotto. During renovations in the 1930s, the washhouse was buried and replaced by a concrete tank for an oil-fired boiler. Electrical infrastructure was also installed, including an inspection space with grounding rods. The eastern building beside the palace crossed the route into the garden, formerly called Via della Fortezza, and was only partly examined archaeologically.
Industrial remains
The later pharmaceutical plant installed four interconnected tanks of different sizes for filtering or decanting materials during drug preparation. Wells for discharging wastewater were built south and east of the building. The garden was rearranged with a new flowerbed and drainage channels. Parts of Palazzo Scotto, its associated walls, and enclosed rooms were lost through the 1943 bombing and subsequent alterations, while the restored garden and surviving fortifications remain within the public park.
Archaeological layers beneath the garden
Archaeological investigations carried out between 2003 and 2005 examined approximately 1,000 square metres between Lungarno Galilei and Lungarno Fibonacci. The work revealed the changing use of this part of Pisa from the pre-Roman period through the modern era. It identified the Roman floor, the medieval parish district, the bell-making area, fortress-related changes, and later domestic and industrial activity.
Church and cemetery
The excavated northwestern part of Sant’Andrea was aligned east to west. It consisted of a single room with three entrances and a pitched roof. River pebbles formed the simple floor, while the interior walls were plastered and may have been painted, as traces of color survive at their base. After the Arno flood of 1333, the walking level outside the church was raised. A sandstone threshold and two added steps preserve the evidence of that alteration.
A small cemetery lay north of the church. It contained nine earth-cut graves arranged alternately with trees, forming a garden cemetery associated with the monastic character of the surrounding complex.
Bell-founders’ workshop
The bell-founders’ workshop occupied about 750 square metres of the excavated area. Its buildings had been destroyed when the fortress was constructed, but the bell-casting pits survived. Cut directly into sand, the pits were lined with reused bricks bonded with clay and connected by a long channel to an elliptical chamber where firing took place. A circular impression left by a clay bell mold shows that the workshop produced relatively small bells.
Later domestic evidence
A refuse deposit from a remodeling phase yielded table and dining ceramics that illuminate everyday life in the mid-nineteenth century. The material included substantial quantities of English-made pottery, a notable group from the manufactories at Albisola, and Tuscan imitations. Together with the palace, garden, fortification, and industrial installations, these finds preserve the physical record of Cittadella Nuova’s transformation from a military enclosure into a civic and industrial complex.
