Just like every other place on earth, Florence has ghost stories.
First: Here’s the square. It isn’t the best-kept part of Florence, which is a shame for it is home to the wonderful Ospedale degli Innocenti designed in the “new Tuscan style” of 15th-century Florence by the master architect, Brunelleschi (he who designed the Duomo’s dome).
Below is the Ospedale, or “foundling hospital,” or orphanage.
The square sits in the center of Florence, relatively close to the city’s central heart of il Duomo. The Piazza is a 15 minute walk from my home here.
A patrician palazzo stands facing the Piazza in the furthest west position on the square is known today interchangeably as il Palazzo Grifoni o il Palazzo Budini Gattai, and this is the building attached to a romantic ghost story. It is a mystery known in Italian as
“La finestra sempre aperta!”
and it goes something like this:
Once upon a time, there was a rich young man who lived in this palazzo. He fell in love with a beautiful maiden and a marriage was arranged. The girl moved into the palazzo with his parents to wait for him, for he was leaving for war.
The young maiden sat embroidering in her room, day after day, year after year, looking out the window, watching for her handsome finace to return from battle. It is said that the top right window in the palazzo is the window next to which she sat.
Sadly, the young warrior never returned to his home in Florence and the girl grew into a woman and then into an old woman and she eventually died in the room near the window which she had spent her life looking out.
After her death, her room was cleared and the window was shut. But then strange things started happening. Doors and windows in the palazzo started slamming open and shut, the lights went off and on, and all manner of disruptive things kept happening. At last the window in the girl’s window blew open and the caretakers discovered that as long as that window stayed open, things in the palazzo were calm.
And that is why, so they say, that this window always remains open, as indeed you see in my pictures.
get back, lauretta! 