Dark Side of Florence: mysteries and legends tour

"It was a dark and stormy night..." no, really, it was a dark and stormy night. We went on a walking tour on the evening it rained the most while we were in Florence. I knew the forecast when I signed up for the tour. I was just hoping it was wrong.

Ashley joined us for Guru Walk's Dark side of Florence, mysteries and legend's free walking tour. She even learned something on the tour.

The tour started in Piazza Annunciazo. We saw our leader standing under a bright green umbrella. We appreciated being told to stand in a dry spot with the others waiting for their tour. We heard what I thought was Italian, but might have been Spanish. Turned out two groups were starting at the same time. As it was raining, I did not bring my digital camera, which limited the number of pictures I took. The ones in daylight are pictures I recreated on a different day.

Angelina our guide let us stand in the dry area as she began her tour. Part of me hoped we could just stand in the same place listening to her tales for the next two hours, but it is more interesting when we see the places she is talking about it. Wetter, but more interesting.

From our dry spot she told us about the building we were standing under. It used to be an orphanage. Their cries can still be heard .... dun dun dun.

Our first story was about the Medici family because all tours in Florence must include at least one story about the Medici family. The older brother was a duke. He was in love with one woman, but forced to marry the princess of Austria. They have six children. When she is pregnant with their seventh she "falls down" a flight of stairs and dies. The husband of the other woman mysteriously died. Now the original couple is free to marry. They died mysteriously after eating cake. 

During the great flood of 1966 dead bodies were disturbed. They decided to do an autopsy on him because they could. Turns out he died from arsenic poisoning. She was buried in an unidentified pauper's grave, so her body was not exhumed. His brother is a cardinal destined to become a pope. Upon his brother's death he becomes the duke and gets married. His daughter is very frail. She never leaves her home. She uses an above ground passageway to travel between her home (which later became the orphanage and is now the Archeology Museum) and the church next door. She can be heard screaming. The passageway has since been blocked off. 

Across the piazza is a tall brick building with shutters on most of the windows.
According to legend, this was the home of newlyweds. Three days after they got married the husband was sent off to war. The wife looked out the window waiting for him. One day new owners closed all of the windows on a stormy night. The house suddenly stared falling apart -- pictures fell off the walls, etc. until one window was opened. Ever since then, the window has been left open and they have not had a problem since. Angelina encouraged us to leave our dry spot to check it out. Yup, one window is open.

Our next tale is more gruesome. We walked to the tower by the Duomo down a side street we had not walked on before to reach the scene of the story. It was not raining much at this point. The tale is of a woman buried alive during the plague. 

Tale as old as time ... a young woman from a wealthy family falls in love with a commoner. Unbeknownst to her, she has been betrothed to an older man since she was a baby. They are to wed when she turns 16. Soon after the marriage, she is declared dead from the plague. In an effort to slow the spread of the plague, she was buried immediately in a tomb under the cathedral. For some reason, the worker did not completely seal her grave. When she woke up and realized she was buried alive she clawed her way out of the tomb and ran down the street to her home with her husband. By this point, she was bloodied and looked dead. He was frightened and turned her away. She went to her parents' house. They, too, thought she was dead and turned her away. She then went to the commoner's house. Antonio took her in and nursed her back to health.

Well, her husband felt he was disgraced so he asked the bishop for advice. The bishop declared that since she came back to life, therefore her husband was free to remarry. No one wanted the daughter to remarry him. She had nightmares from being buried alive and went crazy. To this day on the first of each month she can be seen running from the tower to her home with her husband.

As I write this, it is the first of the next month. Ashley had hoped to be in that spot at midnight to see if it is true, but she wasn't able to be there. It turns out, Ashley spent a few nights in what used to be the house where the bride lived with her husband. It is now a hotel.

As we walked to the next location we passed by a the towers we saw on an earlier

tour. Angelina quipped "if this was the morning tour I would tell you...., but it's not so instead we'll talk about how this was a women's prison," and continued to describe some horrors that took place there.

Plaque to indicate bombing

We walked from there to the location of story #5. In 1993 there was a mafia-led bombing in Florence. Spookily, two days before the bombing a nine-year-old girl wrote a poem that in hindsight predicted the bombing. The poem survived the fire. Sadly, the girl did not.  She and her family were killed in the bombing and were unrecognizable. Only last year, the man responsible for the bombing was found guilty.

The Tree of Life statue represents the victims of the mafia killing. The statue high up is a symbol of the killings.

Poem the girl wrote

They patched the opening

Tree of Life statue

Angelina found us a dry spot for our last story. As it takes place outside of Florence, it wasn't necessary to be directly in front of the site, as it was with the last couple of stories.

There was a couple murdered in their car in the Chianti region. Over a period of 14 years, similar murders took place, and then they stopped.

Clearly Angelina is a better storyteller than I am, but you get the gist of the tour.

Since we were near the Ponte Vecchio, Ashley parted with us to head back to hear apartment. I paused to rub the boar statue by the Leather Market. I'm a sucker for a tradition that says if you do this tiny thing, you'll return. I'm still trying to get back to Rome after tossing a coin in the Trevi Fountain. We nearly went back on this trip, but it felt like a lot of running around for a day trip. Yes, even more running around, and more expensive than some of the other day trips we took. Note: Don did not toss a coin in the Trevi Fountain or rub the boar statue, and we tend to travel together, so read into that as you will.

While rubbing the statue a cute older couple stopped to rub the statue, too. The wife said her husband always rubs the boar when they are in Florence. Sweet. They left arm in arm under an umbrella.  

Don and I finished the evening with dinner at a restaurant near our hotel. I had risotto. Don had penne arribiata. 

By starting our day with a church service it felt more like a Sunday than a Friday.