The History

It is now over 130 years that ‘La Loggia’ has been standing sentinel over Florence, from the Piazzale Michelangelo. It was placed on guard, so to speak, in 1865: to watch over the city, to protect it. To control its development and history.
La Loggia, like the Piazzale and the boulevards that link these structures to the city, is the work of a municipal engineer, Giuseppe Poggi, who was commissioned by the city administration to ‘tidy up’ Florence for the arrival of the Piemontesi and the new government: the Royal Family and the bureaucrats, who came reluctantly to the banks of the Arno to govern the newly created kingdom of united Italy. So the engineer did what he could, ‘tidying up’ the beautiful old city with a few alterations and adjustments: away with the Old Market from the area that is now Piazza della Repubblica, away with the houses of the Ghetto from Piazza dell’Olio and surroundings, above all away with the city walls from what are now the boulevards that have saved the city from being strangled by traffic, traffic that continues to increase in volume exponentially.
But the genius of Poggi lay not only in the planning of these encircling avenues but also in the soaring development of the ‘viale dei Colli’ and the Piazzale Michelangelo, conceived as a vast natural balcony overlooking Florence.
And ‘La Loggia’ is the heart of the piazzale. Poggi wanted it there for a specific purpose: it was to be a Michelangelo museum, with a niche containing Lorenzo de’ Medici duke of Urbino.
Well, the works of art never arrived here.
This little book is intended to celebrate the 130 years of this monument, and to emphasise its connection with the city spread out beneath it, and also with Fiesole, which stands magnificently opposite.