About This Location
This is a mobile audio guide. A map in the app helps with navigation, and the audio plays automatically when GPS shows arrival at each spot. Now the tour starts with a monument that many people walk past without realizing what it represents. This obelisk stands in Piazza dell’Unità Italiana, just beside the north side and apse area of Santa Maria Novella, and close to Florence’s main train station zone. Around it, the view is mostly late 19th-century Florence - big hotel façades, offices, and busy streets that connect the station area to the historic center. The monument was commissioned in 1880 by a committee linked to veterans of the 1848-1849 campaigns. It was meant to honor those who died in Italy’s wars of independence and unification, and it was inaugurated on 29 May 1882, at the moment the square took its current name celebrating national unity. The obelisk is about 15 meters tall. Look closer and it becomes a “timeline in stone.” The shaft is built from stacked blocks of dark lava stone, set on a base that alternates local pietraforte with lava stone. Bronze details - including an eagle, wreaths, and garlands - and several marble plaques carry dates and dedications. Over the decades, more inscriptions were added for later conflicts, so its meaning grew beyond the original Risorgimento focus. Here is a surprising local detail: during the Napoleonic period, this same square area was used for executions, with a guillotine platform set up here between 1799 and 1814. It is a sharp contrast to the calm memorial style seen today. If the stone looks cleaner than expected, that is not luck. The monument was restored in 2008, ahead of the 150th anniversary of Italian unification celebrations.