Palazzo Davanzati

Want to know how a wealthy Florentine family actually lived in the fourteenth century? Not in a palazzo stuffed with Renaissance masterpieces, but in a house with painted parrots on the bedroom walls, a toilet on every floor, and an internal well system that brought water to each story — luxuries that most European nobles wouldn't enjoy for another two hundred years.

Palazzo Davanzati was built around 1350 for the Davizzi family, then purchased by the Davanzati family in 1578. It was restored in the early 1900s and opened as a museum of Florentine domestic life, preserving the rooms exactly as they would have looked in medieval and early Renaissance Florence. The Sala dei Pappagalli — the Hall of Parrots — has frescoes of colorful birds perched in geometric gardens, painted directly on the walls as a kind of medieval wallpaper. The Sala dei Pavoni — the Hall of Peacocks — is equally vivid.

The house is a time machine. The kitchen sits on the top floor, not the ground floor, because heat rises and medieval Florentines wanted cooking smells and fire danger as far from the living quarters as possible. The ceilings are painted wood, the floors are terracotta tile, and the furnishings — heavy wooden chests, wrought-iron candelabras, woven textiles — are all period-appropriate.

Most visitors to Florence are so blinded by the Renaissance that they forget the city existed before Brunelleschi. This palazzo is the corrective: a detailed, intimate look at the medieval world that the Renaissance grew out of, hidden on a side street that the crowds never find.