Palazzo della Stufa

Palazzo della Stufa in Florence, Italy, is a medieval Florentine palace erected by the Lotteringhi Della Stufa family in the 14th century. Built and altered across later centuries, the building bears elements from the late medieval period through the Renaissance and into the Baroque, and it served for centuries as the urban residence of a single lineage whose members played roles in the city’s religious and political life. The long continuity of occupancy and the survival of visible older fabric give the palace a clear place in Florence’s built history.

The family that established the house settled in the city in the 11th century under the name Lotteringhi and adopted the Della Stufa surname while they held the Stufa of San Lorenzo, the city’s public bath. The family owned properties on the site from at least the 13th century. Members of the household included religious figures of note: Lotteringo Della Stufa, named among the seven founders of the Servants of Mary, and the friar Girolamo Della Stufa, both regarded as blessed.

Construction on the present palace began in the 14th century and was substantially rebuilt in the 16th century on the earlier medieval houses the family had long kept. Around 1470 the block was crowned by an elevated open roof terrace supported by six columns, a prominent feature that survives from the later fifteenth century and that appears on Buonsignori’s engraved map of Florence of 1584. During the later Renaissance the Della Stufa remained aligned with the Medici.

Around 1665 and 1666 the corner segment, later known as the Della Stufa–Traballesi portion, was enlarged after the family received an inheritance. That intervention produced a new, simpler seventeenth-century front for that bay, with a central arched entrance and an arrangement of square openings at street level, without extending the raised-stone treatment or the large top-floor terrace of the older fifteenth-century block. Restorations carried out in the early 1970s brought older parts of the building fabric to light, and both the main palace and the adjoining block were included in the 1901 governmental list of monumental buildings to be regarded as national artistic heritage. The property remained the family home for about seven centuries until it was converted to condominium ownership in 1946.