Palazzo Agostini or dell'Ussero or Red
Gothic red-brick palazzo whose ground-floor café hosted Italy's first scientists' congress.
This guide to Palazzo Agostini, the Red Palace in Pisa, opens in the autumn of eighteen thirty-nine with a plainclothes police agent listening for politics over coffee, sent to monitor the first congress of Italian scientists that Grand Duke Leopold the second allowed on one strict condition: science only. It follows Carlo Luciano Bonaparte, Napoleon's nephew, who maneuvered the Grand Duke into hosting four hundred and twenty-one naturalists, physicists and astronomers from across a still-fractured peninsula. The guide traces what really happened downstairs at the Caffe dell'Ussero, where the official rules did not quite hold. The building itself dates to the thirteen hundreds, built by joining two medieval towers into one house of red brick.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.