Corso Italia

This guide follows Corso Italia in Pisa from the moment in sixteen oh three when Grand Duke Ferdinando I ordered a neighborhood of medieval tower houses torn down to make way for Bernardo Buontalenti's arcaded loggia, built by Cosimo Pugliani for wool merchants, silk dealers, grain sellers and the money changers who worked the banchi. It reaches back further still, to a document from twelve twenty eight that already places metalworkers along this route when it was known as Carraia San Gilio. You'll also hear how the street's name and shape kept shifting through the nineteenth century, as the railway station, a vanished gate and a new square rearranged the neighborhood around it.