My favorite museum in all of Florence, at least for today, is a great big dollhouse known as the Palazzo Davanzati.

It isn’t really a dollhouse, but to me it has always felt like a playhouse for life-sized historical living dolls, sort of like Williamsburg in the United States. I’ve been visiting this place for thirty years and I love it the very most out of all the musei in Firenze.

At least for today.

Because my love for beauty can be fickle; one day I like marigolds the most and the next day it is geraniums. Or, one day I like kinnikinnick the best and the next day it’s lantana.  Today my favorite color could be green while tomorrow I realize I can’t live without orange.

My favorite line from opera is “La donna è mobile!”  The lady is fickle.  It’s probably a good thing I only had one beautiful child.

Anyway, back to the palazzo: when I wander through the building, starting in the lovely courtyard and then climbing the stairs to level after level, finding the kitchen, the bedrooms, the reception hall, I feel like I am a living doll from say about 1375, and I get lost in what I think it must have felt like to be the daughter in a wealthy household in Florence.

And I love it.

But, I already said that, didn’t I?

Well, I really do love it.

This great palazzo was constructed c. 1375 by the wealthy Davizzi family, who were operatives in Florence’s important wool guild.  Life and society in Florence at that time were organized by the major and minor guilds. In order to be somebody who was anybody, you had to belong to a prominent guild.

After a century, plus or minus, the palace changed hands a couple of times, eventually being purchased by the Davanzati family.  The palazzo remained in Davanzati hands until 1838. At that time, it looked like the palazzo might well have been razed, as many, many ancient buildings were being destroyed within the fabric of the city.

Fortunately for posterity, a wealthy antiquarian, by the name of Elia Volpi, purchased the palace, thus saving it from demolition.  Signor Volpi restored the building to what he believed was its original style.  So, in fact, when we visit this great palazzo, we are viewing an early 19th-century vision of what 19th-century antiquarians thought the lifestyle of the Renaissance looked like.

It is kind of like viewing a kaleidoscope through a kaleidoscope, if you see what I mean.

In 1951, the palace was purchased by the Italian state and in the current century it has been extensively shored up and restored.

The facade of the palace is a unified veneer which actually covers up a mixed bag of earlier, medieval tower homes. Signor Volpi had the vision in the 19th century to purchase all of them with the intent to blend them together as one palace.  The facade is constructed in local sandstone and the topmost floor has an open loggia supported by four columns and two pilasters that was added in the 16th century.

The Davanzati coat of arms appears on the facade and there are traces of other decorations as well.

Let’s go have a quick look!  Andiamo!

The courtyard on the ground level is very nice.

I am absolutely fascinated by the bamboo looking vertical line that snakes down the wall.  It is a water pipe, that collects water from the roof in a rainstorm and carries it down to the courtyard where it drains away.

Let’s climb to the first floor and take a look down into the courtyard from above.

I like the lion who stands guard, discouraging, or even keeping away, the wrong people from entering. I believe he is a version of the Marzocco, the heraldic lion symbol of Florence noted at the Bargello.

A view of the lion and the courtyard from the first landing.  The vibrant red cyclamens caught my eye.  They were much more vivid than this picture captured.

Looking down from the first floor loggia above, I inadvertently caught a specimen of modern man, somewhat out of his native habitat, but still acting true to his current state of evolution. I caught the modern man in his most characteristic posture of the second decade of the 21st century: the” let me look at my smart phone” pose.  It’s everywhere, you see it all of the time, 24/7.  Boys do it, girls do, even educated bees do it. I do it, you do it, it seems that none of us can escape doing it. Let’s do it, “let’s look at our phones.” 

Because I am pretty sure President Obama is texting us or sending us an email, and it’s essential that we stay in touch.  We don’t feel whole without our smart phones. We must be in touch with the world and available at all times.  We must be.

Our smart phones are the elephant in the room, that’s for sure.

OK, back to the palazzo. Here are a bunch of pictures for you to get a sense of this wonderful piece of living Renaissance history.

From the first landing you see directly into the grand front room.  You can see a marble bust sitting inside on a console table between the two windows.

It is so interesting that there is a pully with a rope that would allow you to haul water or anything else up from the ground floor. You see the doors open to this dumbwaiter area and the rope hanging here.  Below is what it looked like when I looked down inside the dumbwaiter space.  Man, a living doll could have a lot of fun with this device! (when I was 3 my family moved into our newly constructed home and my favorite part of the whole thing was the laundry chute…that has got to be where the basis of my interest in the dumbwaiter started).