Every design for Scandicci

Ever noticed how you can leave Florence without realising it? Head south-west out of the city and the streets simply carry on into Scandicci, the two places joined by houses with no obvious border between them.

What makes Scandicci unusual is that it has always faced both ways. For a long time the comune did not even have its town hall inside its own boundaries: it sat in Florence, first in Palazzo Albizi and then in Palazzo Uguccioni. Until the twentieth century the place was called Casellina e Torri, after the two communities that merged to create it. Yet the countryside never left. The Arno forms its northern edge, the Vingone stream runs through it, and the hills towards the Pesa valley are wooded and scattered with villas, among them Villa i Collazzi, whose design is attributed to Michelangelo. The fourteenth-century Castello dell'Acciaiolo, once a defensive manor, now belongs to the public, and the Giardino di Archimede - Un Museo per la Matematica turns maths into something you can touch. The painter Benozzo Gozzoli was born in one of its villages, Sant'Ilario a Colombano.

However close Florence is, coming back to Scandicci still feels like arriving somewhere of your own, with its own name, its own hills and its own way of living next door to a famous city.