The Battle of Florence for the Liberation of the City

In May 1938, Florence hosted Adolf Hitler’s official visit. The route through the Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti, and the historic center was entrusted to the art historian Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, who in his memoirs would recount having thought of killing both dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, along the way. He didn’t.

That gesture never made is, today, a useful starting point: it shows a city that, even before the war, lived a buried tension between formal loyalty to the regime and individual opposition, often silent. Six years later, on those same streets, Florence would become a battlefield in the fullest sense.

On September 8, 1943, the announcement of the armistice caught the city unprepared. On September 11 German troops entered Florence and took control of it. The military presence consolidated quickly: checkpoints, requisitions, targeted arrests. On September 25 the first Allied air raid struck the Campo di Marte station, marking the start of a phase in which the city found itself caught between occupation and bombardment.

Telling the story of what Florence’s civilians and partisans did — often coming from very different political backgrounds — is not simple. To convey the complexity of those months, we offer a narrative itinerary through the symbolic places and some of the most representative figures of this collective endeavor. We’ll follow the key phases of the liberation starting from the Oltrarno, the district from which the partisans and Allied troops launched the grueling “Battle of Florence,” destined to free the city after nearly twelve months of exhausting Nazi-Fascist occupation.

To begin, then, let’s go back to the first days of August 1944, when the two warring sides were preparing for the clash over Florence. Knowing the Anglo-American troops were about to arrive, on the night of August 3–4, 1944, the Germans carried out Operation Feuerzauber (“Fire Magic”), with which they blew up every bridge over the Arno, except the Ponte Vecchio. The aim was to slow the Allied advance and cut off the city’s districts. On August 4, coming up from via Senese, the British troops of the Eighth Army entered Florence through Porta Romana.

Advancing behind the colonial units were several partisan groups, among them the Garibaldi “Arno” Division, fresh from the battles of Pian d’Albero and Cetica. Once inside the city, the Arno Division took up position in the Oltrarno, working to clear the district of the snipers posted on the rooftops. In this first area of our itinerary, Piazza Tasso stands out, the scene of the massacre in which young Ivo Poli lost his life.

The events of July 17, 1944, were a deliberate act by the Fascist units of the notorious Banda Carità, who opened fire on a group of civilians sitting on the benches to enjoy a little evening cool. Five people died, among them the twelve-year-old to whom the park’s playground is dedicated today.

The episode marked the Oltrarno deeply: in the days that followed, many families offered shelter to the partisans, and the square became one of the symbols of the indiscriminate violence carried out by the collaborationist units in the final days of the occupation. After the entry into the city, the links between the two banks of the Arno were secured thanks to the courageous feat of two partisans, Enrico Fischer and Orazio Barbieri, who on the night of August 5 — with the complicity of the municipal police — crossed the Vasari Corridor to reestablish telephone contact with the Tuscan Committee of National Liberation and coordinate with the Allies and with the Oltrarno partisans, still fighting the snipers.

In the days that followed, the fighting was constant and especially violent. Allies and partisans cleared the district of snipers and gave assistance to more than 5,000 refugees, who had been occupying Palazzo Pitti ever since the Germans had blown up the entire via Guicciardini area to slow the enemy advance. With the liberation of the river’s left bank, made easier by the daring of the partisan bands, the CTLN could finally proclaim the General Insurrection. And so, at six in the morning on August 11, the “Martinella” bell of Palazzo Vecchio rang out, the agreed signal to launch the revolt.

Allies and partisans managed to cross the Arno and dig in at the center. The CTLN, chaired by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, proclaimed the provisional government at Palazzo Medici Riccardi, recognized shortly after by the Allied forces as well: it was the first case, during the Italian war of liberation, of a civilian government recognized in a city still partly contested. The newly formed government’s first act was the creation of an improvised press organ, La Nazione del Popolo, printed by candlelight thanks to the engine of an old Fiat 508 Balilla.

There is no shortage of significant places nearby. In Piazza del Duomo, for instance, Archbishop Elia Dalla Costa had already stood out in ’38, on the occasion of Hitler’s visit, when he left the windows of the archbishop’s palace shut so that no “crosses other than that of Christ” would be venerated. A little farther on, we find the historic Caffè Paszkowski in Piazza della Repubblica, where on February 8, 1944, Tosca Bucarelli and Antonio Ignesti had tried to plant a bomb against the Nazi-Fascist officers who frequented the beer hall. It was one of the boldest attempts by the GAP.

Tosca and Antonio had gone inside, but realized they had been spotted. Slowed by her attempt to hide the device in her bag, the young woman was captured and taken to Villa Triste, where she would endure unspeakable torture at the hands of the Banda Carità. After the crossing of the Arno, the city front settled along the Mugnone. From the Cascine to the Cure the Germans defended their positions fiercely, while the partisan groups, now coordinated, were active all over the city. Moving from the center toward the east, you reach Campo di Marte by way of via della Colonna and Piazza d’Azeglio, an area that preserves many traces of the occupation and the clandestine struggle.

Here a significant part of Florence’s Jewish community was concentrated, already hit by the first deportations from September 30, 1943, despite the efforts of the Jewish-Christian Committee and of DELASEM, the Delegation for the Assistance of Jewish Emigrants. On platform 16 of the Santa Maria Novella station, a plaque still commemorates the 300 Jews who would be deported from here to Auschwitz on November 6, 1943. Only 15 would return. Piazza d’Azeglio was also the last clandestine base of Radio CORA, dismantled on June 7, 1944, after an informant’s tip-off.

Created by the Action Party (Partito d’Azione) and run by members of the “i” Information Service, the radio had made it possible to keep clandestine contact with the Resistance and the Allies from the first months of ’44. The operators of the clandestine radio are remembered in a monument in the square and in a plaque on the nearby Palazzina dei Servi. In the same district there were also actions crowned with success — like the extraordinary feat of the GAP who, on July 9, 1944, managed to break several women prisoners out of Santa Verdiana by disguising themselves as Fascist militiamen. Elio Chianes and Bruno Fanciullacci, leading the operation, had slipped into the prison and had sixteen imprisoned partisan women handed over to them, among them Tosca Bucarelli herself, who had just survived the torture of Villa Triste.

The Campo di Marte station, a target of Allied bombing from September 25, 1943, is one of the most important places of the city’s memory. It was also the scene of the dramatic episode of the men rounded up in the Quadraro, deported to Florence and left locked in a cattle car all night, just as the Allies were bombing the tracks (in April 1944). They were a group of residents of the Roman neighborhood of the same name, seized for draft evasion, political opposition, or partisan actions against the occupiers.

Moving beyond the station and crossing the footbridge, we head into the Campo di Marte district, which during the occupation saw some of the gravest episodes in the city’s history. Particularly bloody, in fact, had been the execution of a number of young draft resisters. On the morning of March 22, 1944, at the foot of the Artemio Franchi stadium, a firing squad shot five men in their twenties, part of a group previously rounded up at Vicchio del Mugello by a unit of the Florentine GNR, assisted by an Ettore Muti squad and some German units.

The event, traumatic for the whole district, had set off a feverish clandestine activity that, following the general insurrection, would turn into open war. Walking toward the Cure, we come to via Pacinotti, at the mouth of Ponte al Pino: here, in August of ’44, the four partisans who fell defending the bridge distinguished themselves. Among them was Dr. Guido Horloch, a partisan doctor who chose to communicate with the other side of the bridge despite the real risk of being hit. On his way back from the Command of the fourth partisan zone, where he had received reassurances about the imminent arrival of reinforcements, Horloch was struck and died shortly after.

The fallen of via Pacinotti are remembered in a plaque, at the corner with Viale dei Mille. Going from the Cure toward Statuto, you encounter other important sites of the clashes along the Mugnone. First of all, though, we must note the presence of Villa Triste, the center of Fascist repression in Florence: in the rooms on via Bolognese the Banda Carità tortured and killed partisans, Jews, and civilians suspected of collaborating with the Resistance. The gang, led by Mario Carità, acted with total autonomy and brutality, becoming the most ferocious symbol of Fascist-Republican violence in the last months of the occupation.

Among the fallen along the Mugnone is also Ettore Gamondi, director of the Officine Galileo. Since we are approaching Ponte alle Mosse and the site of the final clashes, it’s worth making one last brief digression on a hugely important episode that starts precisely at the Officine Galileo and involves much of the entire city: the general strike of March 11, 1944, against the occupying forces.

The event was so momentous that it prompted Hitler himself to issue a direct order against those involved: in what was the largest workers’ protest in occupied Europe, the Officine Galileo, the Pignone, the Manifattura Tabacchi, and dozens of other factories came to a halt (including those in Prato, at the time in the province of Florence). Workers, men and women, refused to labor for the German war machine, but the reaction was brutal.

At the Santa Maria Novella station, in fact, we find another plaque, this time on platform 6, remembering the grim fate of thousands of strikers: the terrible concentration camp of Mauthausen. Once past the Mugnone, you reach the last part of the city to be liberated, after two weeks of relentless fighting among partisans, Fascists, Germans, and snipers. In this phase the action of the partisans of the so-called Casone dei Ferrovieri (the railway workers’ block, between Via Mercadante, Rinuccini, Petrella, and Ponchielli) was decisive, becoming a strategic point in the last days of the battle.

The railway workers, many of them already active in the Resistance, organized observation posts, relay runners, and aid stations that gave the rest of the partisans a secure base, made almost impregnable by the massive walls. The Germans, by now aware of their imminent defeat, pulled back again, but not without a fight. On August 20 the Justice and Liberty Division advanced along via Vittorio Emanuele II, forcing the Germans into one last paratrooper assault from the Rifredi station. Over the next two days, German artillery kept shelling the city center from Piazza Dalmazia, while the clashes continued at Ponte di Mezzo and on via Bolognese as well.

The last outpost defended was Careggi, where doctors and nurses also operated as partisans in disguise, taking refuge in the so-called Lazzeretto (which the Germans avoided entering). The hospital was surrounded by German positions, including one with two heavy machine guns and another with sixteen men at the main gate. Going out in a white coat, risky as it was, became a tactic used even by those who weren’t doctors, to bring back food for the 1,500 patients and the many refugees.

Famous is the episode of the man who, posing as a doctor, managed to bring into the hospital a pig killed in the bombing, carried on a stretcher by fake orderlies. Through the sewer system it was also possible to reach Piazza Dalmazia from the Obstetrics ward: on August 24, once the passage was discovered, the Germans shot Ugo Ferri and Gino Coli at the Villa Pepi boarding school. After two heavy artillery bombardments, Careggi was liberated at dawn on August 31, 1944. The German troops left Florence and withdrew to the Gothic Line. The end of our route brings us to the Fortezza da Basso. On September 7, 1944, General Edgar Erskine Hume, commander of the American Fifth Army, organized a ceremony to celebrate the liberation of the city.

The partisans handed over their weapons to the Allies, receiving diplomas and certificates of military valor signed by Marshal Alexander, supreme commander of the Allied forces in the Mediterranean. It was the first official recognition — together with the acceptance of the CTLN’s provisional government — of the strategic role played by the Resistance in the national liberation. Since we’re at the Fortezza, let’s allow ourselves one final reflection on the Piazzale dei Caduti nei Lager, which recalls the fate of the IMI, the Italian soldiers interned after September 8. Unable to take part in the country’s civil rebirth because they were deported to German labor camps, many of them, on their return, were met with suspicion.

Their story remains one of the least-known pages of Florentine and national history: it represents the choice of more than 600,000 soldiers who said “no” to the Italian Social Republic and paid for it with deportation. Piazzale dei Caduti nei Lager keeps their memory.

Telling the story of the Florentine Resistance and its places can be complex. That’s why it’s worth mentioning one last space, precious for anyone who wants to dig deeper into this intense and painful — but certainly necessary — history: the Tuscan Historical Institute of the Resistance and the Contemporary Age (Istituto Storico Toscano della Resistenza e dell’Età Contemporanea), at via Carducci 5/37, which holds a vast heritage of books, newspapers, and primary sources. So that we never forget and, above all, never repeat the horrors of that fratricidal war that swept over all of Italy, and Florence in particular.