Florence’s Open House

Guests of the Four Seasons Hotel Firenze can stay in the former palazzo’s Chinese Room – now the Volterrano Suite – which is decorated with restored Chinese wallpaper.

It’s aperitivo time in Florence and I’m sipping an icy Negroni outdoors at the Four Seasons Hotel Firenze in the largest private garden in the city, an 11-acre oasis dotted with botanical rarities like a century-old Thuja tree. It’s hard to escape your fellow tourists here, but right now – strangely, at an outpost of a Canadian hotel chain – I’m surrounded by rapid-fire Italian conversation and men in pastel linen suits.

Not surprising, perhaps, considering this was formerly the Palazzo della Gherardesca – a very Florentine 15th-century treasure once owned by the Medicis – and the 16th-century Il Conventino, with art and frescoes that could otherwise be hanging in the Uffizi or the Palazzo Pitti. At the hotel’s restaurant Il Palagio, with its vaulted ceilings and muted grey tones, I order the veal Marsala, then wonder if I’ve played it too safe. But chef Vito Mollica’s take on this Italian classic is herb-roasted and not too rich, not too sweet. It’s a reflection of the setting: tradition spruced up and made exciting again.

A visitor takes in photographs by Sarah Pickering during an exhibit at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina. (Photo: Sarah Pickering)

The overhaul of the Gherardesca was headed by Jacopo Mazzei, a marchese whose family has been making wine in the Chianti region since 1453. Some of the city’s most incredible yet disused architectural gems have been transformed into restaurants, bars, apartments and art spaces, finally flinging their doors open to the public. Just when we’d all written Florence off as an old depository of post-Medieval, pre-Modern Italy’s many cultural, social and artistic triumphs, the city has embraced something completely uncharacteristic: change.

At the new three-level FOR Gallery, on Via dei Fossi, I meet one of the co-owners, 33-year-old gallerist Ori Kafri. He shows me around FOR’s narrow floors, where the focus is on contemporary Italian photographers, and waxes poetic about his hometown. “In the past, Florentines have been more conservative and not prone to really promoting the best the city has to offer,” Kafri tells me. “Yet we have the best food and some of the most unique hotels in the world, and all the fashion brands are here. What we were missing was the right administration to promote it differently, without relying solely on the same old attractions.”

Enter cherub-faced Matteo Renzi, the centre-left upstart politico who became mayor of Florence at the age of 34 in a country famous for its septuagenarian politicians and sluggish, byzantine bureaucracy. Along with expanding recycling programs and banning cars from the city’s main square, the Piazza del Duomo, the young mayor is finding new ways to promote Florence’s cultural legacy. Earlier this year on a trip to Washington, the media-savvy Renzi managed to score a meeting with Barack Obama at the U.S. Conference of Mayors, then signed a deal with the National Geographic Society to revive and document the decades-old hunt for the infamous lost Leonardo fresco Battle of Anghiari, believed to be hidden in Florence’s city hall, the Palazzo Vecchio.

A more modern staircase at cult concept store Luisa Via Roma. (Photo: Pietro Savorelli)

On a tour of the newly reopened Palazzo Tornabuoni, once owned by Cardinal Alessandro Ottaviano de’ Medici – a.k.a. Pope Leo XI – I take in the restored frescoes painted by Agostino Ciampelli in the late 16th century. Now managed by the Four Seasons, the converted site – the handiwork of local architect-designer Michele Bönan – houses 38 luxe apartments. “Tornabuoni has frescoes from the 1500s through the 1800s, it’s in the heart of the city and a lot of history has passed through it. Of course, being from here, I was excited to work on it,” says Bönan, the picture of a poised Florentine gentleman with his tanned skin, salt-and-pepper hair and polished leather shoes. “Before now, for 100 years Palazzo Tornabuoni was a bank – a place of business, not pleasure. Now it has come back to life in a meaningful way,” he says.

And he’s right: In the sunny courtyard of the mozzarella bar Obikà, flanked by slender arcades, Florentines are having a lot more fun than they would at a bank. Local retail workers and families indulge in leisurely, light lunches of antipasti and salads. My tasting platter consists of three impossibly fresh buffalo cheeses (mozzarella, burrata and ricotta), razor-thin sliced prosciutto and grilled veggies anointed with olive oil. Sure, the food is delicious, but more than anything, the Florentines seem to be relishing the Tornabuoni’s new lease on life – not to mention their city’s other revamped classics.

Across the street at the Palazzo Strozzi, a different kind of palace is being reborn, where art is now the star. Since World War II, the Strozzi had only been open during temporary exhibitions, until the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation took over. A neon-lit stairway leads to the palace’s former wine cellars, now the Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina, where I catch Emerging Talents: New Italian Art. Alone in the sparse gallery space, I’m mesmerized by Andrea Dojmi’s 29-minute, sun-bleached film The Distance to the Sun, set near secret military zones in Nevada, complete with haunting, otherworldly desert landscapes and visiting aliens. Upstairs, in the main exhibition marking the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s first cosmic discoveries, kids dart around after participating in one of the art workshops given on-site.

The gardens at the Gherardesca date back to the late 15th century. The hotel’s La Villa suite is hidden in the convent’s former limonaria – a glass house that was used to store the garden’s lemon trees over the winter. 

Before leaving the city, I stop at Luisa Via Roma, Florence’s premier fashion-forward concept store, where contemporary art installations and a café-bar share space with the latest collections from cult-status designers like Haider Ackermann and Gareth Pugh. While black-clad women browse racks of sparkly black clothes, I speak to the shop’s head of special projects, local artist and ad man Felice Limosani. He explains how the Renaissance, that epic explosion of creativity, might, curiously, be the very thing that stifled the city for so many years. “What was once a city that taught the world the art of living, that promoted the passionate exchange of knowledge, devolved into a society plagued by a focus on the past not in line with the current aspirations of the rest of Europe.” But as Limosani and his creative cronies see it, a new age is dawning. “The bureaucrats devoid of vision are dying off, and formerly impossible things are becoming possible.” Or maybe that old Renaissance spirit has just been rebooted for the 21st century.

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