A little more on the house and its history
13th CENTURY
The house belongs to the category of buildings that historians of Tuscan architecture call “spontaneous architecture” being the result of additions made through centuries by successive generations. Its most ancient part is deemed to go back to the 13th century and one can still detect, where now is the upper part of the sitting room, the features of a small square tower conceived as a lookout of a fortified farm, named “Le Stinche alte”, that today survives as a ruin. “Le Stinche” in the second half of that century belonged to the Florentine family of Guido Cavalcanti, a close friend of Dante Alighieri and himself a renowned poet, who, like Dante, was a “Guelfo Bianco”s (a “White Guelf”), that is a follower of the moderate faction of the “Guelf” Party.
This fortified farm in 1304 was assailed and taken by the “Guelfi Neri” (“Black Guelfs”), the radical faction of the Guelf Party that had become the fierce enemy of the “Guelfi Bianchi”. At that time, the “Guelfi Neri” acknowledged as their leader Charles II of Anjou, King of Sicily, whose son Robert, Duke of Calabria and future king of Sicily, was moving from southern Italy to Tuscany with a large party of knights (see Davidsohn, Storia di Firenze, german title Gechichte von Florenz)). In due time the small lookout developed as an agricultural farm.
