Piazza della Repubblica, Florence

Foundations of a thermae complex on the south side and a religious building were found in the 19th-century demolition of the warren of medieval streets that had encroached upon the site.

The actual marketplace here was a long, low building in an oval rectilinear plan, with an overhanging roof to shelter the customers and the stalls placed on either side.

The present column dates to 1431, and is surmounted by a grey sandstone statue of Dovizia (or Abbondanza), by Giovan Battista Foggini, replacing an original by Donatello (found to be irreparably eroded in 1721.

The present appearance of the square is the result of the city planning announced and carried out on the proclamation of Florence as the capital of Italy (1865–71), with particularly intense activity in this Piazza between 1885 and 1895.

In this period, known as the Risanamento in the commemorative nineteenth-century terminology (or, by its detractors, the sventramento or ruining), large parts of the city centre were demolished.

The decision to broaden the square allowed the total destruction of buildings of great importance: medieval towers, churches, the corporate seats of the Arti, some palaces of noble families, as well as craftsmen's shops and residences.

The demolition was presented as a necessity if the area's insanitary conditions were to be improved, but was in reality led above all to building speculation and to legitimization of the will of the emerging middle-class emergente, protagonist in the events immediately prior to unification.

The town in fact underwent an enormous loss, minimally compensated for by the rescue of monuments like Vasari's Loggia del Pesce that was dismantled and reassembled in Piazza dei Ciompi.

An old photograph taken on the day of the inauguration show the buildings of the square still incomplete and covered for the civil ceremony in scenery representing good luck.

The palaces that rose in the new square, painted bitterly by the young Telemaco Signorini, followed the eclectic fashion of the time and had been planned by already well-known architects: Vincenzo Micheli, Luigi Buonamici, Giuseppe Boccini.

Following this transformation, the square became a kind of "lounge" for the town; since then refined palaces, luxury hotels, department stores and elegant cafes have sprung up around it, among which the known Caffè delle Giubbe Rosse, where famous scholars and artists met and clashed.

(The ancient centre of the city / restored from age-old squalor / to new life)On top of the Arcone is an allegorical group of three women in plaster, representing Italy, Art and Science.

Entirely covered with photographs, drawings and memories of its famous patrons, the Caffè was the location for the brawl between the Milanese Futurists of Marinetti and the Florentine artists centred on the magazine La Voce di Ardengo Soffici.

Its centrality in city life did not diminish, however, particularly in the first years of the twentieth century, when the cafes facing onto the piazza became a meeting-place for artists and men of letters.