Florence, an ultra-luxury hotel is planned next to the Pitti Palace. It will be a shambles

In Florence, landscape protection associations are fighting against a project for an extra-luxury resort that should see the light of day in the area of the former Costa San Giorgio barracks in the Oltrarno district, a stone’s throw from the Pitti Palace, next to the Boboli Gardens and just below Forte Belvedere. The project is expected to breathe new life into the building that formerly housed the barracks and is now in a state of disrepair: the area is owned by a private individual who wants to establish here a hotel for wealthy tourists, with more than one hundred rooms (85 standard, 20 suites, and 18 apartments), a restaurant, a bar, a swimming pool, a spa, and underground parking.

The intentions of the area’s owners have already clashed with the opposition of environmental associations and various members of Florentine politics, receiving criticism from both the left and the right ( Dimitrij Palagi of Sinistra Progetto Comune and Alessandro Draghi of Fratelli d’Italia have already spoken out against the project). There are two points in particular that those opposed to the project insist on: the landscape impact of the structure in one of the most beautiful areas of Florence, and the fragility of the land. Last July 25, the Idra association addressed twelve comments on the project to the City’s Urban Planning Department and the Superintendency, also pointing out to the mayor of Florence, Dario Nardella, the lack of information among residents and the city population. According to Idra, the plan for the construction of the hotel will heavily and radically alter the area between Ponte Vecchio, Palazzo Pitti, Boboli Gardens, Costa San Giorgio, Forte Belvedere, via di Belvedere and via San Leonardo, going to impact on the level of safety, health and environmental quality, protection of the historical-artistic heritage involved, the same impacts on the civic sensitivity of residents and public opinion, Idra also sent three questions to the director of the Uffizi Eike Schmidt.

Also according to the Idra association, the Urban Planning Directorate would not even have consulted the Uffizi Galleries Directorate, which is responsible for the protection of the Boboli Gardens and the Pitti Palace, “despite the fact that both are at a very special risk of impact in the planning projections,” as stated in the letter that the association sent to Uffizi Director Eike Schmidt. In fact, the Florence City Council’s Urban Planning Variant contemplates, the association writes, “a singular option for customers to enter the future hotel no less than through the Palace and Garden, with access to a so-called ’inclined elevator’ to be installed near the Grotta di Madama, which would lead them panoramically to the resort. The rack-and-pinion elevator would then continue its ride over the Boboli boundary wall to transport interested guests to Forte Belvedere.”

Already in the comments to the variant sent to the Urban Planning Department, Idra’s president Girolamo Dell’Olio wrote that “it is not understandable how it was possible to admit even theoretically the solution, hypothesized by the project, of an inclined elevator to serve the flow of customers of the private structure in question with access inside a public museum space”: a hypothesis, according to Dell’Olio, that denotes “a worrying subservience of the public subject to the pressure of private interests.” In addition, again according to Idra’s president, the solution that envisages “an access of the hotel’s clientele to the inclined elevator service from the main door of the Pitti Palace, through paths that can hardly be qualified as functional, which would have to be followed in order to take advantage of that service and which involve stretches within the Palace and the Garden, in promiscuity with visitors, as far as the Grotta di Madama, the western terminus of the rack, adds to the design a revealing note of paradoxical ignorance of the most elementary criteria of feasibility, admitting the presence of private flows within a state-owned space managed by an institution of the Ministry of Culture endowed with autonomy, the Uffizi Galleries, with the candid expectation of the involvement of a private contractor for the realization of interventions on public property.”

And then there are problems of viability, Dell’Olio points out: “In the current road layout, it is worth noting, there are no alternatives to Costa San Giorgio, Costa Scarpuccia, Via dei Bastioni, Via San Leonardo, icons of the historic Florentine road system, necessarily one-way. This is according to all evidence an unbearable pressure, both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view, taking into account the characteristics of the context that describe this strip of the city as a landscape oasis deserving of the utmost protection.” Another issue, that of the area’s hydrogeological tightness: “proposing on Belvedere Hill,” Dell’Olio further writes, “exorbitant earthworks and movements that may affect the stability conditions of a hillside that historically has shown evidence of subsidence, and has been a source of constant concern even by rulers such as Grand Duke Cosimo I (this is attested by the celebrated plaque in Via de’ Bardi, in front of the underlying church of Santa Lucia dei Magnoli: ’Cosimo de’ Medici, lord of Florence and Siena, forbade the rebuilding of the houses on this mountain that had collapsed three times due to the inadequacy of the soil’), seems a peregrine and ill-advised decision.”

Finally, according to Idra, at the moment the Superintendence’s contribution is not formalized in a written opinion: there are only a few lines recorded in the minutes of the Services Conference in May 2019, during which it seems it was agreed not to subject the plan to Strategic Environmental Assessment. Pending new developments, for the association, in short, it is simply “a shambles” and “a highly speculative operation as well as risky for the territory.”

Pictured is the hypothetical pedestrian entrance for hotel guests with the inclined elevator.

Florence, an ultra-luxury hotel is planned next to the Pitti Palace. It will be a shambles

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