📜 History · 1600s
Florence's wine windows (buchette del vino)
Tiny arched hatches in palace walls, used to sell wine without contact during the plague.
Walk around central Florence and you'll spot small arched openings, about the size of a book, set into the stone walls of old palazzi. These are buchette del vino: wine windows. Noble families who owned vineyards used them to sell their wine straight to customers in the street, skipping the taverns.
They became especially useful during the plague of 1630–1633. The Florentine scholar Francesco Rondinelli described in 1634 how wine sellers avoided touching customers' flasks to reduce the risk of contagion. Exactly how old the windows are is debated: some, such as the Antinori family's on Via del Trebbio, are said to date from the 1500s.
The Associazione Buchette del Vino, founded in 2015, has counted around 180 of them. Most are bricked up, but during the Covid-19 pandemic some reopened to serve wine, coffee and even ice cream, just as they did four centuries ago. Look for them on Via del Trebbio, Via delle Belle Donne and around Santo Spirito.
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