Palazzo Anselmi Ristori

History and description

Walther Limburger (1910) indicates the building as an ancient construction that was much restored in 1893. In fact, here stood the old houses of the Anselmi and the Sassetti, which passed to the Ristori family and then in the 19th century to the Alinari, who until the 1970s kept their photography shop here in the corner. As part of the work of «restoration» of the old centre and, more specifically, the extension of Via degli Strozzi (circa 1895) our building was partially demolished on the side of this street, then erected by the firm "Simonelli e C. " the new façade in the style that, with its graffitied drafts, the horseshoes at the bottom and the many sting irons flanking the simple windows at the top, must have appeared to many more than plausible in harking back to a medieval architecture that in this glimpse of via de' Sassetti is repeatedly recalled and that in the palazzo Davanzati standing out in the background has one of its best known examples. Not so for Guido Carocci who, from the pages of Arte e Storia judged the building to be «mean and the details badly chosen and worse applied. The splayed windows of the mezzanine and the rectangular ones of the third floor are not in relation to the rest of the building; the false drafts of the window surrounds are badly divided; the graffiti friezes placed in a perpendicular direction are a completely new invention; the windows without the recurring frame have never been seen in the comparable buildings of the 15th century…». …