Palazzo della Canonica

Palazzo della Canonica was leased to the Scuola Normale Superiore by the State in 2012. With its long main block, it occupies much of the south side of Piazza dei Cavalieri. The building is currently undergoing  renovation and is intended to house the library collections of the Scuola Normale. Parts of the library are already present and accessible in those areas where modernisation works have been completed.

Sober, massive, and of limited height, the building separates the present Via Ulisse Dini and Via San Frediano. Giorgio Vasari designed it in 1566 at the behest of Cosimo de’ Medici to house the priest-knights (cavalieri sacerdoti) of the Order of Saint Stephen  who served in the church of the same name directly opposite. After the church itself and Palazzo della Carovana, the Canonica was the third architectural project on the piazza to occupy Vasari, who was assisted in Pisa by Davide Fortini.

The main façade of the Palazzo della Canonica – completed almost thirty years after work began, when building activity in the piazza resumed under Ferdinando I de’ Medici– rises over three storeys. Its central axis is emphasised by the entrance portal flanked by slender pilasters, a first-floor balcony with a window, and a broken segmental pediment above. Each upper floor has eleven windows; the ground floor has ten. All are framed in pietra serena, with different profiles at each level. The same stone marks the central axis and forms the benches flanking the entrance. The wall surface is plain rendered plaster, devoid of figural decoration. The rear façade, by contrast, features a three-storey loggia.

As for the construction of Palazzo della Carovana, Vasari sought in the Canonica to make full use of the existing medieval structures. Many of these – especially in the left-hand portion of the building – were revealed again during the restoration work undertaken in the 1980s by the Genio Civile (Public Works Office), the palace’s temporary occupant after the property passed from the Order of Santo Stefano in 1859.

The extensive programme of rehabilitation currently being undertaken by the Scuola Normale – supported by sub-floor investigations coordinated by the Soprintendenza for the Provinces of Pisa and Livorno – is likewise contributing to our understanding of the pre-existing medieval fabric incorporated by Vasari, as well as his construction strategies and of the original spatial layout of the interiors. That distribution had been gravely compromised by the numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century alterations the palace underwent. Very few traces of the original interior decoration survive, and those that do are fragmentary and difficult to interpret.