OVERLOOKING THE SQUARE

The portico of Palazzo Strozzi has been in public use for over one hundred and fifty years but its 62 meters in length have been conceived from the beginning, in 1495, as a kind of filter.
Filter between the emptiness of the largest square in the Renaissance city, piazza Nova (today Ariostea), and the fullness of the buildings that would have been arranged on its sides. A filter that holds and attenuates, in fact also through the light, the impact of a clear wall, harmoniously closing the square.
Filter, in the sense of detachment, even between the two streets that precede and follow the portico, and which are not perfectly aligned with each other, one (via Palestro) called to connect the new city to the old one, and the other (via Borso ) to lead towards the timeless horizon of the Certosa monastery.
The slight inclination of the portico with respect to these streets allows a delicate perspective artifice so that, approaching and following it, you will always see the vanishing point change.
The loggia extends in a sequence of 15 arches with wavy leaf capitals, and is part of the building originally built for the brothers Carlo and Camillo Strozzi, court dignitaries to whom Duke Ercole I d’Este had granted the land but not the faculty to build the building as they please. The portico, however private, was a prerequisite for looking out onto the square, inserted in the larger floor of the new city.
Today, instead, the tables of the various rooms follow one another, where from morning to evening the people of Ferrara stop happily for breakfast or an aperitif.

Test & Photos by FERRARA LOVELY PLANET