Two floors of blue in the center of Florence

The apartment, ideal for a couple or a family with up to 2 children, is located in the heart of the city. From here, museums, churches, palaces and historic squares of Florence can be reached in just a few steps. Sufficiently out of the way so as not to hear the noise of the nearby restaurants and clubs, the apartment, finished renovating in 2023, is on the ground floor of the historic Palazzo Mannini and presents itself to our guests as simple and informal, in one word unique.

This apartment was born, like the other three of ours that are next to it, absurdly, on a tragic day for Florence: November 4, 1966. The ground floor of the Mannini noble house has in fact belonged to our family since the 1930s, when our grandfather, bought the land to make it a general store. At the time it was a single large room, born in the late fifteenth century, as a courtyard, cellar or stable. This can be easily understood by looking at the facade of the entire building from the street, where the windows on the first and second floors have a more elegant frame than ours on the ground floor. In this space the grandparents created their business, selling sand, sand, cement and bricks to the bricklayers who showed up in the morning with carts and wheelbarrows. At the end of the Second World War, the business, which passed under the management of our father, moved to the adjacent and busier Via dei Neri, relegating these spaces to storage for the main shop. Until the morning of 4 November 1966 precisely, when after days of torrential rain, the waters of the Arno overcame the parapets, submerging all the houses in the historic center and reaching in some points, like ours, even 5 meters in height. You can see this by looking up at the corner of via San Remigio and via dei Neri, where the sign of water is still shown on a plaque. But it was just then, after the waters receded, leaving mud and debris behind, that our parents got the chance to transform the commercial land into a residential home, giving birth to this and three other apartments. Since then, more than fifty years ago, the center of Florence has undergone various transformations: the flight of the Florentines towards the "comfortable and modern" suburbs, the massive and somewhat disorderly invasion of tourists from all over the world, finally the covid that for some time sedated and emptied everything, making the city strangely silent for a few months. However, Florence has always remained there: beautiful, magical, romantic, even a little mysterious and austere. And our home too, like the city, has been able to adapt to change, knowing how to renew itself but remaining itself. So today, after a renovation completed in 2023, it offers itself with its simple history but totally renovated, comfortable and ecological. Simple like the surname of our family, very common in Florence and with popular roots. In fact, a very short distance from us you will find one of the main streets which is called with our same root, but with the noble title: yes, they were the lords, they lived on the upper floors with elegantly framed windows! What surname? When you are our guests you will find out easily