The Palazzaccio – loc. Granadieri – Scandicci (FI)

Design: 1998-2008 – Implementation: 2009-2011

The Palazzaccio (or “Portonaccio” or Palagaccio “) is the name of a building artefact whose origins are lost in the course of centuries, located in the municipality of Scandicci in a town named Granadieri.

Its original appearance might suggest a rural building but, actually, the uses that characterized it in the past have given it very different connotations. Originally it was used as a defensive structure, then as a civil or even noble residence. Among the household names mentioned in the property of the Palazzaccio there is one that definitely takes a prominent position: Ghiberti.

Lorenzo Ghiberti, in fact, in 1441 bought the property which consisted of “… an estate with a tower to be put into a fortress and home to a sir, with ditches around and circuit walls and drawbridge …”. Lorenzo and his son Vittorio performed numerous works of transformation and the villa was their property until 1547, when it was bought by Luca Benintendi.

The restoration project and the subsequent building work carried out in consultation with the architect Gianna Cinotti as Director of the work and the architect Gabriele Nannetti as Manager on behalf of the Superintendence for Architectural, Landscape, Historical, Artistic and Anthropological Heritage for the provinces of Florence, Pistoia and Prato, started, unfortunately, when the decay and degradation were strong almost evenly throughout the building, after a high number of collapses of many of the structures of that plan and with the increasingly likely risk that some masonry elements, deprived of natural connections constituted by floors and by roofs and subjected to the continuous aggression of the atmospheric agents, could suddenly give way.

This disastrous state of deterioration as well as a functional failing consequent the abandonment of the countryside of the early ’50s, was also favoured by the structural complexity of the building that, from the first defensive configuration, has been transformed into a country villa, contemporary to all the others in the same rural area of the XIVth Century and subsequently, with careless interventions meant to solve urgent needs, it has taken the formal and functional characteristics of a farmhouse at the service of agricultural land.

The project developed itself as reasonable synthesis of specific functional consequent reuse of the building and the composition of the same and with the need of consolidation and / or reconstitution of the elements such as walls, floors and roofs, some of them missing or partially collapsed or in an advanced stage of degradation. In compliance with the compositional elements of the building, the project is based on a few simple components:

– the new system of stairs and shelves to link the two floors of the building planned in the area which,

originally destined to the court, has come to be defined as an area covered only in ancient times;

– a significant consolidation of the wall elements, without rebuilding the intermediate floor, of the toilets

in order to place the stairway that starts from the basement of the tower and, higher up, a

further staircase to the top of the tower and the local above the vaulted room;

– the reconstitution of the intermediate floors, roof, and the perforated patterns exclusively aimed to

propose a plausible picture of the building through the reopening of closed compartments changed

over the years.

Only on the north side, in the remaining part of the old city walls, it is expected to carry out alterations on a window, certainly built during agricultural transformation of the structure in order to create a new access to the building.