Some fun facts about our city!

The list of curiosities to be discovered in our city could be endless. Here we want to let you in on just a few secrets to ensure that your visit to Florence, as well as being artistic and cultural, is also full of uniquely quirky photos that not everyone will understand. 

We are simply inviting you to look around and capture some of our city's most entertaining and curious aspects Are you ready to discover them? Let's get started...

LET'S START WITH A VISIT TO THE CATHEDRAL OF FLORENCE TO DISCOVER THE CLOCK THAT RUNS ANTI-CLOCKWISE

The Florence Cathedral is magical, from every point of view. We invite you to linger on a small detail. Right in front of the altar is a large painted clock that works perfectly thanks to a complex mechanism on the other side of the wall. This clock was painted by the great Paolo Uccello, who had the marvellous idea of making it run backwards, perhaps wishing to make up for lost time... Reading the correct time is very complex, because in addition to this fact, in Paolo Uccello's times, the day began in the evening. The hours were counted following the liturgical calendar and the length of an hour was not always the same but varied depending on the seasons. Fantastic... right?

THE FIRST GRAFFITI IN HISTORY WAS MADE BY MICHELANGELO ON THE PALAZZO VECCHIO

It's true. To the right of the entrance you can see a bit of graffiti made by Michelangelo himself. The story goes that Buonarroti was often stopped in the piazza by a rather annoying gentleman who liked to chat a lot. One day, while Michelangelo was listening to one of his stories, he decided to pass the time by carving a face on the wall. Michelangelo's graffiti is known by the Florentines as “l’importuno (the nuisance)”.

NOW LET'S PLAY AT FINDING THE OUT-OF-PLACE STONE IN PALAZZO PITTI!

Yes, yes, that's right. If you look carefully at this majestic building there is something “out of place”, a small detail “only” 10 meters long! In the very beautiful mosaic made of Renaissance-style stone blocks, each block measures about 30 cm, but then there is that block, the protagonist of this short story! The Pitti family was a bit peculiar and always wanted to show off their grandeur. The head of the family, Luca Pitti, wanted to add this 10-meter stone block to the facade to represent him, grandiose and powerful, in the midst of all the other small and insignificant ones!

THE SUNDIAL OF THE CHURCH OF SANTA MARIANOVELLA

Outside the Church of Santa Maria Novella you will find something very interesting on the sides of the entrance door. Those two strange objects are nothing more than two ancient astronomical instruments used by a monk and astronomer in the late 16th century. Ignazio Danti studied the sky to try to understand how to reconcile the astronomical equinox with that established by the Julian calendar. To do this, it was decided that 9 days would be eliminated from the calendar, officially marking the origin of the Gregorian Calendar. Like a science fiction film, in 1582, the people went to bed on October 4th and woke up on the 15th, which explains why Saint Teresa di Alvia died in the night between October 4 and 15.

HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF THE BRINDELLONE DOOR?

Yes, we know, apparently it's nothing more than a large wooden door on Via il Prato, but for us it's really important because it hosts the “brindellone”, which is none other than Florence's Easter cart, 11 meters high, from which every year at Easter, all citizens receive the blessing of fireworks when the odd brindellone cart is lit!