Firenze Santa Maria Novella Railroad Station
One of Italy’s finest railway stations, Santa Maria Novella is familiar to everyone who has travelled the high speed line between Florence and Rome. It was built between 1932 and 1934, by the Gruppo Toscano (an architectural team guided by Giovanni Michelucci, and including Gamberini, Berardi, Baroni, and Lusanna) who won the commission in a competition.
In terms of style the station is a profoundly influential work of Italian Rationalism, expressing a modernity and rational functionality central to the movement.
The construction is characterized by large expanses of glazing and skylights, with large spans (no interior columns) resulting in a billowing, luminous space. The front facade is clad in traditional pietra forte, the predominate Florentin sandstone with calcite veins.
The station is immediately adjacent to the renowned church of Santa Maria Novella (hence the station’s name) and presents a remarkable urban pairing between the monuments of the early Renaissance and modernity.
Interestingly, the train station has had other lives too, as during the catastrophic flood of the Arno River in 1960, the station was used as a base for restoring damaged artwork from the flood. Here is a UNESCO image (photographer Dominique Roger, 1960) showing the washing of works on paper after the flood:
