| Background |
| Site Description | The building was originally constructed for the Davizzi family during the second half of the fourteenth century, with most estimates circling around the decade of the 1370s. Oriented vertically and shoe-horned between extant buildings that squeezed its contours, the palace rises some five stories and includes large meeting rooms to the north, dining and kitchen facilities to the west, and reading rooms/studies to the south, all of them stacked one on top of the other from floor to floor. Bedrooms are located in the southeast corner and contain primitive frescoes. Oddly, they also have small latrines connected to them, a luxury for the 14th century. The trapezoidal courtyard is ringed on the upper floors by a corridor that connects to each room outside it, providing slaves and servants easy (and largely unnoticeable) access to residential areas. The building changed hands multiple times, winding up in the possession of the Davanzati family in 1578. It was sold to the Volpi family at the end of the nineteenth century and, after significant renovations, was transformed into a museum in the early 20th century.
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| Project Description | Florence As It Was has multiple aims within its broad goal of recreating selected structures in the city as they appeared in the year 1500. The pointclouds and photogrammetric models we build certainly serve their purposes as visual portals into the past, but the translations of early modern descriptions, transcriptions of contemporary documents, and the creation of a database of people, places, and things weaves these images into layers of information that help us interpret what we see. Intended as a study tool (as opposed to a substitution for the real thing), this project provides users with a combination of the type of original source materials that historians of art and architecture in particular typically use when crafting scholarly works. Its multi-variances routinely force us to make choices and adhere to a list of priorities as we go. We have progressed deliberately and with an eye toward posting the most original portions of our work first, and then filling in the gaps later on. We have concentrated much of our attention on the physically and politically challenging work of securing permissions, traveling to Florence, and then using state-of-the-art technology to scan the most important structures in the city before editing and modeling those scans so that they reflect accurately the dimensions and color patterns of those buildings.
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| UNESCO World Heritage Site | Historic Centre of Florence |
| External Project Link | View exhibit |
| Collection Date | 2018-02-12 to 2018-02-16 |
| Publication Date | 2026-03-19 |
| License Type | Restricted |