Casa Acciaiuoli

History and description

This is a fifteenth-century house formerly belonging to the Acciaiuoli family (owned by the family until its extinction), bordering on a Bonciani palace on the corner of Via delle Terme, "which still retains the remains of its sturdy and severe construction". The wealthy banking family had its headquarters in this area of the city, as evidenced by the adjacent Palazzo Acciaiuoli and the Torre degli Acciaiuoli. The family's most important building no longer exists today: it was located on the opposite side of the street and had a beautiful façade on the Lungarno, but it was swept away by German mines in August 1944, which gutted the entrances to the Ponte Vecchio.

Casa Acciaiuoli has a typically 16th-century façade, with stone elements standing out against the background of light-coloured plaster. "From the very first years of the 16th century, the Acciaiuoli family had built their new palace in the borgo (today house number 10), according to those chastened late 15th-century dictates (two orders of centred windows, with flat projections, as around the portal; elegant marcadavanzale cornices; rectangular windows on the mezzanine). The front facing the Cornino chiasso retains some of the earlier projections".

The main front is developed over three floors on five axes. On the ground floor is an off-centre arched doorway, framed by bugne arranged in a radial pattern, flanked by later openings that today allow access to commercial buildings. Beyond the windows of the mezzanine, also profiled in stone, is a row of five windows with cornices similar to that of the doorway, joined by a billboard, partially filled in for a resizing of the openings. On the top floor, the windows, also on a marcadavanzale band, are without the relief frame and rectangular in shape.