Florence, City Hall

The Piazza della Signoria is the political stage of Florence, with the Loggia della Signoria and the fortress-like Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s best-known landmark. A copy of Michelangelo’s David and many other statues make this virtually an open-air museum of sculpture.

The dozens of festivals in Florence include “Calcio Storico Fiorentino,” a Historical Football (soccer) game in Piazza Signoria in June, with the players dressed in elegant costumes from the 1600s.

One year when we visited, the Piazza had been excavated. Foundations of buildings from who-knows-when had been uncovered, but now they were in the process of filling in the excavations, covering those building shards. We talked to a professor from the University in Florence, and he complained that a previous government spent billions of lire to dig it up and find all these exciting things, and now a new government was spending billions more to fill it in, with no provision for the people to be able to see the ruins. He was right, the next time we visited there was no sign of the excavation or the ancient foundations.

But it’s not all bad, in 1995 we ate ice-cream at the Häagen-Dazs store in the Piazza della Signoria, with a replica of the statue of David and the Palazzo Vecchio (the Florence city hall) in view.