Afterwards he moved to Florence where, at the Caffè Michelangiolo, he met Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, and the rest of the artists who would soon be dubbed the Macchiaioli.

[2] At the National Exposition in Florence in 1861, Abbati was awarded a medal for his interior views—but refused to accept it, as a gesture of protest against the composition of the jury.

His activity as a painter was interrupted during 1866 when he enlisted again in the army for the Third Independence War, during which he was captured by the Austrians and held in Croatia.

He often painted a luminous landscape scene as seen through the doorway of a darkened interior, as in the View from the Wine Cellar of Diego Martelli (1866).

[4] Some of his late landscapes, such as the View of Castiglioncello (1867), are in the greatly elongated horizontal format often favored by the Macchiaioli.