HISTORY AND CULTURE
Blazon Mannelli
Probably descendants of the Manlii family of which Niccolo 'Machiavelli mentions in his Discourses ...
"it seems that not only the one city from the other has certain different ways and institutes, and I procreate men either tougher or more effeminate, but in the same city we see this difference being in the families, one from the other ... . because you can see the Manlii have been hard and stubborn ..... "; the Mannellis were among those families whose fortunes were linked to commercial and industrial activities and which over time supplanted the ancient families of landed nobility.
The new Florentine ruling class, open to new forces, turned out to be more lively and socially composite although it assimilated the mentality and re-proposed the attitudes of the ancient aristocracy: the new families were considered magnatitious as evidenced by the collection of coats of arms preserved in the Strozziane Cards of the State of Florence.
The Mannelli coat of arms consists of a red shield on which three oblique stilettos stand out with the tip pointing downwards and parallel to each other, a symbol of power and recklessness but at the same time of value and honor as reported in a Florentine document of the 1286.
Rivals of doctors
From the Medici to the present day ...
During the Medici period the Mannellis had three senators, ten priors and some podestà who represented the Florentine republic in the neighboring localities:
Prospero was the power of Greve in Chianti in 1611 where Ugolino had previously been in 1562 and 1568; Francesco was from Radda in Chianti in 1580 and 1563; Filippo and Ludovico were in San Giovanni Valdarno, as Camillo was in 1612 in Barberino del Mugello. Enterprising merchants, they were lucky in Avignon and they were responsible for the construction of the oratory of Santa Maria in Quercieto, near Legnaia.
Determined to the point of opposing the expropriation of the Torre dei Mannelli - one of the four towers that underlined the ends of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence -
Background
Commissioned by Cosimo I, in 1565, to allow the construction of a connecting corridor between Palazzo Vecchio and the new residence of Palazzo Pitti. As is well known, Vasari obviated the decisive refusal by inventing a solution that made it possible to outline the Torre dei Mannelli with a structure of wooden beams and stone brackets that projected onto the bridge.
The Mannellis have their inscription among the patricians of the District of S.Spirito in Florence.
Since the mid-16th century some members of the family wore the habit of the Knights of Saint Stephen and others, in the following century that of the Knights of the Order of Malta.
Torre dei Mannelli (on the Ponte Vecchio)
Mannelli Chapel (via Palazzo dei Diavoli, Florence)
C attedrale of Santa Maria Novella
Detail of the Mannelli Chapel
Family symbol inside the chapel
Villa Gallorosso, vista dall'alto