Beyond Renaissance in Florence - The Pagliazza Tower, the oldest building in the city

This tower has the honor of being the oldest building in Florence, miraculously remaining in its original appearance. Built in the 6th century AD, almost surely by the Byzantines during the war with the Goths (535 - 553), it was part of the second smaller city walls, after the Roman ones. The circular shape, rare in the Middle Ages, certainly dates back to Roman building technique. In 1980, during the restoration, it was discovered that the tower rests on a circular wall that surrounded a swimming pool or a room of a Roman thermal structure in the shape of an exedra and it seems that this is the origin of the unusual semicircular shape of the tower. In the basement there is a calidarium, with brick floor channels for heat, a compartment for steam baths. It is known that in the 12th century it was used as a women's prison and it seems that the name derives from the straw mattresses on which the inmates used to sleep. Then until 1785 it was used as the bell tower of the nearby church of Santa Elizabetta, then as a private house. The building has a hasty and primitive construction in limestone, sandstone blocks and other heterogeneous materials found from Roman monuments in ruins., walled “a filaretto" with mortar, a Roman technique in which stones of roughly similar size are arranged in horizontal rows, the windows and doors structured instead with bricks. On the façade putlog holes and corbels that supported the beams for external walkways, a kind of balconies. Today it is home to a luxury hotel and includes a small museum with Roman and medieval materials found in excavations. Florence, Piazza Santa Elisabetta.