Villa Triste

From March 1944 until the Liberation of Florence on 11^th August of the same year, the building was the headquarters of the Gestapo and a division of the Special Services of the RSI, known as the Banda Carità, which took possession of two flats on the ground floor and the basement of the building and transformed them into prison cells. The name ‘Villa Triste’, literally ‘wretched house’, derives from anti-fascists’ memories of the location, where torture and abuse of Resistance fighters and anti-fascists took place.

After the war, an epigraph dictated by Piero Calamandrei was placed on the building’s facade, making it a symbol of anti-fascism and the city’s memory of the Resistance.

Today, the Palazzo in Via Bolognese is once again a residential building, listed under the protection of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, as it is ‘particularly important owing to its intimate connection with the historical and political events of the nation’, and ‘an ineradicable testimony for teaching new generations about the values of progress in opposition to barbarism’. In 2003, the municipal administration of Florence named the forecourt in front of the Villa after Bruno Fanciullacci, a Florentine member of the GAP (Patriotic Action Group), who took part in numerous partisan actions (including the killing of Giovanni Gentile) and who, after being subjected to brutal torture, died there in an attempt to escape.

In 2018, residents of the building expressed their opposition to a new commemorative plaque which was to be put on the facade of the building. It was therefore instead put on the building opposite which is owned by the Ministry of Justice.

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