Piazza della Signoria
(Signoria Square)

Great Discoveries "Personal Audio Guides" will provide you with the most enjoyable and informative way to visit the Piazza della Signoria. Our carefully researched tour identifies and locates the most relevant treasures to ensure that you do not miss important works and that you clearly understand each item's artistic and historic significance. As you view these carefully selected treasures, our professional narrators, accompanied by historically appropriate background music, will delight, amuse and inform you, making your visit a most memorable experience. Learn about one of Italy's most important squares, a remarkable outdoor gallery of statues, with informative descriptions, photo's, map, sample audio tracks and more.

The Piazza della Signoria has been the political heart of Florence Italy, from the middle ages to the present day. This historic square, packed with people at all hours of the day or night, unfolds like an open-air gallery in which even the statues allude to episodes of the city’s civil history. Facing directly on the square is the Loggia della Signoria, with its three arches, and the dominant Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of the city’s governments since 1302. It houses several notable pieces of public sculpture and is a meeting place for visitors and Florentines alike. Close by lies the entrance to the most exalted of all of Florence’s museums, the Galleria degli Uffizi.

Italian city builders are renowned for effortlessly creating beautiful squares, an art where the Florentines proved generally inept. Only here and at the Piazza del Duomo did they achieve grand and meaningful space. While the Piazza del Duomo provides the focus for the city’s religious obsession, the Piazza della Signoria has always been the civic heart of Florence. Though it sets the stage for Florence’s main civic palace, the grand and imposing Palazzo Vecchio, too many of its buildings are bland 19th century affairs. This said; the square is irresistible as a public forum, if not something of a zoo during busy holiday periods.

Throughout the past seven centuries people have gathered on the Piazza for celebrations, festivals, public executions, feasts and many great events that were staged here. Wild boar and lions have been released here to provide public entertainment and, on one occasion, stallions were loosed among a group of mares, producing, in the words of one chronicler, “the most marvelous entertainment for girls to behold.” Wheeled traffic has been excluded from the square from as early as 1385 and cars are still banned. Begging, prostitution and gambling were also prohibited but begging apparently has at least survived.

In the early days of the Republic the Piazza della Signoria was home to many public assemblies, which in Florence meant that the square often degenerated into a battleground for its inexplicable, devastating, and in many cases deadly domestic quarrels. Political speeches that would stir the crowds to epic levels of violence were given in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, from the arringhiera, or oration terrace, from which the word harangue has derived. Tempers often became frayed, and in 1343 one inflammatory meeting ended with a man being eaten by a mob.

On the other hand when trouble came from without, Florentines would toll their Cacco (bell) in the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio. All their internal squabbles would be forgotten, and the Piazza della Signoria would rapidly fill with the war banners of the city’s various militias and guilds. In 1494, the French King, Charles VIII laid siege to Florence with a large army of French and Swiss troops. “We will sound our trumpets!” threatened the French King, when the Florentines refused to shell out enough florins to make him and his armies go away. “And we will ring our bell!” countered the courageous republican Piero Capponi. The threat worked and Charles settled for a much smaller sum.

The piazza began its formal life in 1307, when the city set aside a small area on which to build the Palazzo Vecchio, then known as the Palazzo dei Signoria. From that time forward to 1549 the Palazzo remained the exclusive political seat of various Florentine governments until the Grand Duke Cosimo I de Medici moved his family across the Arno River to his new home in the Pitti Palace. At that time, the Palazzo dei Signoria became known as the Palazzo Vecchio or Old Palace.

Florence’s artistic heritage is very much in evidence here in the piazza and both the square and the graceful Loggia della Signoria are filled with public statuary by Michelangelo, Donatello, Benvenuto Cellini and other leading lights of the Florence Renaissance. The city is less well known for its contributions to science and one tends to forget that both Leonardo da Vinci and Galileo are Florentines and that it was here that Galileo found refuge from the Inquisition.

Listen to short 2 minute samples of our content. You can also click on the picture for an enlarged view.
Rape of the Sabine	Statues in the Square
NOTE: Please click on the STOP button for your first sample before playing the second sample, or you will not hear it.

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