Between the Duomo and Santa Croce, in the streets around the Bargello where Florence still goes about its own business, an imposing but anonymous Renaissance façade on Via dei Pandolfini gives little away. Its heavy door opens into Palazzo Galli Tassi, built in 1510 by merging several 14th-century merchant houses and frescoed in the 1630s by Giovanni da San Giovanni, Fabrizio Boschi and Ottavio Vannini. The palazzo’s later life was less exalted — a Neapolitan impresario’s syrup factory, then briefly the Ministry of Agriculture when Florence was the capital of Italy — until Martino di Napoli Rampolla, whose family has owned it since the nineteenth century, turned it in 2016 into Numeroventi: part artist residency, part place to stay, part laboratory.

Di Napoli Rampolla — Chianti-born, trained as a graphic designer in Barcelona and Ghent — and his co-founder Alessandro Modestino Ricciardelli set an unusual brief: to re-animate the building not as a museum or a hotel but as an active creative household, hosting artists and designers on residency while offering a handful of apartments to travellers curious enough to step into that ecosystem. With the architect Gianni Emiliani and the designer Andrew Trotter, they left the palazzo’s bones — the frescoes, the pietra serena doorways, the five-metre ceilings — deliberately intact and unretouched, adding only what was contemporary, minimal and often temporary. Works-in-progress sit on a common table; objects from past residents remain in the rooms where they were made; the place feels alive in a way that most hotels, however beautiful, do not.

The seven lofts and suites — each an assembly of historic backdrop and mid-century furniture, some of it designed by the residency’s own alumni — make for a particular kind of stay. One is wrapped entirely in seventeenth-century fresco; another has resin floors beneath a coffered ceiling; the largest opens onto its own dining room. Lamps are commissioned from Florentine makers; kitchens are stocked for cooking, not for ordering room service; bathrooms make quiet use of Carrara marble and local terracotta.

Numeroventi’s strength is its connective tissue to Florence’s artisan economy. Guests are steered into wood-carvers’ workshops, ceramic studios, foundries and leather ateliers — extensions of an ethos in which making is a civic continuity, not a nostalgia. Meals are informal and often cooked in the palazzo’s own kitchen by whoever is in residence; since 2025 a chef-in-residence programme has brought cooks from across Europe into the building for month-long stints. What one takes away from Numeroventi is not so much the memory of a stylish bedroom as the sense of having spent a week inside a working idea.