Your Way to Florence: Hotels, villas, bed and breakfast, tourist services, resources of Chianti, Florence, Tuscany, Italy

In the absence of loggias, an important element of transition between private domestic life and the urban spaces (streets, piazzas) consisted of the street benches set along the street at the base of the houses. The citizens loved to stop "and chat and gossip about this or that person who passed along the street" (B. Varchi). The street benches were ever-present and built of masonry faced with stone in the finer palaces and of simple masonry or covered with boards in the ordinary houses, often in relationship to the shop entrance.