The street that was sacrificed

On 4 August 1944 this street almost completely vanished. What you see now was mostly built after 1950, with two exceptions that have stood here for eight hundred years.

Those towers are narrow and tall, made of rough stone, with the holes where beams once held wooden extensions in place, and right beside them the brick begins, with its generous windows.

That night the German troops pulled back across the Arno. Every bridge was blown up except for the Ponte Vecchio, and instead they flattened the streets at both ends of it, so that one of the oldest streets in the city was destroyed to block a bridge that was left standing. Above a doorway a little further along there's still a glazed terracotta angel, pulled from the rubble and put back in place.

At the end of the street we turn left, onto a wide street with elegant facades and shop windows full of old things.