White, with a little bit yellow in Florence downtown

The apartment, located in the heart of the city, but sufficiently secluded not to hear the noise of the nearby restaurants, allows you to reach Florence's museums, churches, palaces and historic squares in just a few steps. On the ground floor of the historic Palazzo Mannini, it was renovated in 2023 and has a simple, informal, unique and elegant style. Our commitment: making green choices that respect the environment, supporting those who love beauty and love to travel slowly.

This apartment was born, absurdly, on a tragic day for Florence: November 4, 1966. The ground floor of the Mannini noble house has in fact belonged to our family since the 1930s, when our grandfather bought the land to make it a general store. At the time it was a single large room, born in the late fifteenth century, as a courtyard, cellar or stable. This can be easily understood by looking at the facade of the entire building from the street, where the windows on the first and second floors have a more elegant frame than ours on the ground floor. In this space the grandparents created their business, selling sand, sand, cement and bricks to the bricklayers who showed up in the morning with carts and wheelbarrows. At the end of the Second World War, the business, which passed under the management of our father, moved to the adjacent and busier Via dei Neri, relegating these spaces to storage for the main shop. Until the morning of 4 November 1966 precisely, when after days of torrential rain, the waters of the Arno overcame the parapets, submerging all the houses in the historic center and reaching in some points, like ours, even 5 meters in height. You can see this by looking up at the corner of via San Remigio and via dei Neri, where the sign of water is still shown on a plaque. But it was just then, after the waters receded, leaving mud and debris behind, that our parents got the chance to transform the commercial land into residential apartments, giving birth to this apartment. Since then, more than fifty years ago, the center of Florence has undergone various transformations, in the 60s the escape to the "comfortable and modern" suburbs, then the massive and somewhat disorderly invasion of tourists from all over the world, finally the covid that for some time sedated and emptied everything, making the city strangely silent for a few months. Meanwhile, the 4 apartments have always remained there, simple and silent, even a little heroic, until in 2020 we said to ourselves that too much time had passed since the last renovation and we needed to update and make the apartment modern, comfortable and possibly ecological. welcoming our guests. So we did and after more than two years of work, we are now offering you an updated, tiny piece of our family's history, made up of transformation and simple Florentine history. Simple like our very common surname in Florence and with popular roots. In fact, a very short distance from us you will find one of the main streets which is called with our same root, but with the noble title: yes, they were the lords, they lived on the upper floors with elegantly framed windows! What surname? When you will be our guests you will find out easily….