Palazzo Vegni

The palazzo takes its name from one of its most recent owners, the engineer Angelo Vegni, an entrepreneur and one of the founders of the Officine Galileo. In 1860, he raised the building and unified the façade, removing the medieval battlements and conserving its central fine late sixteenth-century stone portal.

The initial building dates back to 1292, when Gherardino Gianni, known as Gherardino Juniore, a predominant figure in the economic politics of thirteenth century Florence, joined three terraced houses belonging to his family, typical of the Florentine minor residential building style; he also constructed a solid tower house topped with Guelph battlements, the main nucleus of the future Palazzo Gianni. The interventions of subsequent centuries changed its structures and appearance, although it was above all the renovation of the façade and the elimination of the battlements, under Angelo Vegni, that wiped all traces from the face of the palazzo of its glorious medieval and Republican past.

In 1976, ten years after the flooding of the Arno and in the midst of a housing crisis, the palazzo was occupied by some homeless families who, in order to divide it into apartments, carried out extensive re-structural works. In April 1980 the Municipality of Florence acquired the building, which was in danger of collapsing, and evicted the families. At the end of the nineteen-eighties, conservation and restoration work was carried out, which gave the building its present-day state, in which it initially housed the Faculty of Architecture.

Recently, some parts of the building were granted to the Scuola Normale by the Municipality of Florence; since 2024, these have housed the teaching and research spaces of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences.