Tourist attraction
Logge dei Banchi
Via di Banchi, 5, 56125 Pisa PI
Marble-arcaded market hall raised for wool, silk and money-changers' stalls, its basement later a bathhouse hiding a buried gold hoard.
Logge dei Banchi in Pisa was built for money changing hands: a marble-arcaded loggia raised for Grand Duke Ferdinando I in the early sixteen hundreds, where wool merchants, silk traders and money changers once haggled under a dozen marble pilasters. The guide traces how architect Bernardo Buontalenti cleared away a medieval quarter of tower houses to build it, and how a nearby museum came to hold a hoard of thirteenth-century gold coins unearthed here in 1925. Twice a week the loggia doubled as Pisa's grain market.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.