The house is younger than its name. Annalena’s story comes down to us from Niccolò Machiavelli, who tells it in his Florentine Histories, written in the early sixteenth century.
From Annalena’s palace to the pensione
Her youth
Annalena Malatesta, daughter of Countess Orsini and Galeotto Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, loses both parents. She is entrusted first to Count Attilio Vieri dei Medici, then adopted, with her great fortune, by her cousin Cosimo de’ Medici, who with his wife Contessina de’ Bardi raises her as a daughter and gives her the finest education.
1439
She marries Baldaccio d’Anghiari, commander of mercenary troops. Cosimo gives her the palace as a dowry, and the couple moves in.
1440
Baldaccio defends Florence in the battle of Anghiari and wins the admiration of the Medici court. Cosimo rewards him with every honour and makes the palace one of the most beautiful houses in Florence, with frescoes, paintings and magnificent furnishings; works by Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi that were once here are now in the Uffizi and the San Marco Museum.
The convent
Widowed after a conspiracy against her husband, Annalena, who was expecting a child, also loses their only child. She turns her home into a convent.
1786
The convent closes, and the building becomes a conservatory for widows.
1808
The conservatory is suppressed for good.
19th century
The palace goes through many changes. Leading figures of European history live here, among them Carolina Bonaparte, Napoleon’s sister, and Raffaello d’Orléans, son of a king of France, until the house known today as the Casa di Annalena is built, in a style inspired by Neoclassicism.
1919
The Calastrini Rossoni family opens the first and second floors as a hotel, the Pensione Annalena, which soon becomes a favourite of travellers, foreigners, poets and musicians.
The decades that follow
The Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale, the writers Jacques Bertion and Carlo Levi, and Francis Henry Taylor, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, stay at the Casa di Annalena.
Later years
With the Teatro Goldoni close by, at the corner of Via dei Serragli, the Annalena becomes a meeting place for actors such as Vittorio Gassman and Tognazzi, and for Luigi Dallapiccola.
Today
Hotel Annalena still welcomes guests on Via Romana, across the street from the Boboli Gardens.
Montale at the Pensione Annalena
Eugenio Montale often stayed at the Pensione Annalena. Here he met his love and muse Irma Brandeis, the Clizia of The Occasions. Room 9 was his favourite, and there he wrote one of his most passionate poems, Interior-Exterior, about the beauty and the sense of harmony of the house.
Montale called the interior of the Pensione Annalena “charming, slightly démodé, very romantic”, and recalled: “I was impressed by the gallery on which the rooms on the floor overlooked and the underlying garden […] which was of discreet grace and beauty, secluded.”
Source: the history of the house as told by Hotel Annalena.
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