On 4 August 1944 this street almost completely vanished. What you see now was mostly built after 1950, with two exceptions that have stood here for eight hundred years.
Those towers are narrow and tall, made of rough stone, with the holes where beams once held wooden extensions in place, and right beside them the brick begins, with its generous windows.
That night the German troops pulled back across the . Every bridge was blown up except for the , and instead they flattened the streets at both ends of it, so that one of the oldest streets in the city was destroyed to block a bridge that was left standing. Above a doorway a little further along there's still a angel, pulled from the rubble and put back in place.
At the end of the street we turn left, onto a wide street with elegant facades and shop windows full of old things.
Sources. Story: Comune di Firenze (Borgo San Jacopo, postwar reconstruction); Treccani (Firenze, the destruction of August 1944) Photos: Borgo San Jacopo, Florence, September 1944, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain
