Giuseppe Poggi

Until it became the capital on February Italy 3, 1865, Florence had been happy to muddle along picturesquely inside its city walls, little changed since the Middle Ages. Its new status and newly arrived King Vittorio Emanuele II, however, made the inadequacies of its fabric all too apparent. Previously the government had been in Turin, a rational relatively up-to-date Baroque grid of a city. Florence was picturesque but terribly out of date. A flood in 1844 had wrought serious damage.

The movers and shakers decided to embark on a thirty year modernization plan called the Risanamento di Firenze, the 'Restoration of Florence' and chose architect and engineer Giuseppe Poggi (1811-1901) to mastermind the project. A native Florentine, Poggi was respected for his not-too-radical Neo-Renaissance style (among other projects, he had deftly added on the extra period rooms for Frederick Stibbert's growing horde of baubles, and rearranged the gardens of the Orti Oricellari).

And the Walls Came a-Tumblin' Down