Oct. 29, 2026

Tuscany Ghost Stories: Spirits, Saints & Superstition

Tuscany Ghost Stories: Spirits, Saints & Superstition
Tuscany Ghost Stories: Spirits, Saints & Superstition
Two Voices. No filter. Talking Truth from Italy
Tuscany Ghost Stories: Spirits, Saints & Superstition
Spotify podcast player icon Spotify Spotify
Spotify podcast player icon Spotify Spotify
Season 2

It's spooky season and you better believe that there is a myriad of legends in Tuscany that are as mysterious as they are spooky. Let's start with the open window in Piazza Santissima Annunziata that hasn't been shut in centuries. Legend says the one time someone tried and the house started throwing books off the shelves.

For our Halloween and Ognissanti special, we brought in Alexandra Lawrence: British Institute of Florence lecturer, accredited guide, Dante devotee, and the woman Georgette texts every time she needs to know whether something in Florence actually happened. (Usually, annoyingly, it did.)

Together we sort Tuscany's ghost stories from the real history they were built on. A devil outsmarted by a dog on a bridge near Lucca. A noblewoman whose beauty routine involved a thirty-year contract with Satan. And a Palazzo Vecchio whose windows have seen more executions than any building reasonably should.

Then the other side of the season: why Italians spend November 1 and 2 scrubbing headstones and arranging chrysanthemums, why the Etruscans packed cheese graters for the afterlife, and two cemeteries worth a slow walk. Alexandra will die on the hill that Florence's history needs no embellishment. She will not, however, set foot in a deconsecrated country chapel after dark.

n this episode, we cover:

  • Meet Alexandra: touring King Charles around Florence (yes really), the Zoom lectures born when the pandemic emptied the city, her Radical Renaissance Women series at the British Institute, and why she's technically not an art historian (her degree is in Italian literature)
  • The window that never closes: Palazzo Budini Gattai, a bride still keeping watch, and the very real possibility that a cleaner shuts it by accident one day
  • The devil at Giotto's bell tower: Valentina's folklore explanation for the Duomo wind tunnel, picked up from her teacher, the Tuscan story collector Lapucci. Georgette's verdict on the man who never came back: "Sounds like every Florentine man."
  • Where the legends live: Valentina's reason for starting Too Much Tuscany (not just the shopping), and Lo Struscio Fiorentino, the first book to collect Florence's stories
  • The Pazzi Conspiracy: Giuliano de' Medici stabbed 19 times in the Duomo, Lorenzo saved by Francesco Nori (whose tomb in Santa Croce everyone walks past to look at Michelangelo's), the consecration of the host as the go signal, and the conspirators hanged from Palazzo della Signoria and the Bargello
  • Savonarola: an apocalyptic preacher in a hair shirt and black robes in a city dressed like the Magi Chapel, four years in power, a Borgia pope, the San Marco bell, the Bonfire of the Vanities, and his ashes in the Arno. Florence still throws flowers in the river for him every year.
  • Florence doesn't do extremes: but, Valentina notes, it does do revenge (see: salting the earth of conquered towns)
  • The Devil's Bridge of Borgo a Mozzano: Castruccio Castracani's medieval bridge over the Serchio and the dog sent across first and we asked Alexandra why the 14th-century devil was so damn busy.
  • Borgo a Mozzano's Halloween festival: Georgette's visit years ago, a genuinely scary haunted house, and her rule for Tuscany: "Everything's spooky if you just throw some spiderwebs on it." Plus Bagni di Lucca next door. Maybe don't send your dog first.
  • Older than the Church: Etruscan banquets for the dead, olive pits in tombs, and Halloween as a kind of Carnevale
  • Cemeteries, without the fear: November 1 with flowers and blessings, photos on Italian tombstones, the English Cemetery (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, late-April irises, FAI tours and the nun who looks after it), San Miniato al Monte's monumental cemetery and a saint who carried his own head up the hill (football hold, we've decided), the Florence War Cemetery, and the German Military Cemetery at the Futa Pass on the Gothic Line
  • Keeping the dead in the conversation: talking to our kids about the people we've lost, and why facing death head-on is the point of all of this
  • Cose a Caso: Alexandra's favorite legend, La Berta at Santa Maria Maggiore ("just like a man, using his powers for evil"), Lucca Comics weekend with a theater kid, and Grinch vs. Halloween

For the record: the open window, the windy corner, the devil's bridge and La Berta are legends. The Pazzi Conspiracy and Savonarola are documented history, with the paintings and paperwork to prove it.

Guest

Alexandra Lawrence has spent more than 25 years in Italy working in journalism and international education, as a lecturer in art history and contemporary Italian cultural studies, and as an accredited guide for Italian museums and archaeological sites. Her academic background is in Italian literature, with a focus on 14th-century Florentine poetry and Dante. Since 2020 she has designed and run lecture series and courses on her own and with The British Institute of Florence, from Dante's Divine Comedy and Boccaccio's Decameron to Renaissance women and the Medici. She also runs an online book club devoted to Italian authors in translation and writes Illuminare, a twice-monthly Substack on literature, art and life. 🔗 Illuminare: · The British Institute of Florence: · Instagram:

Links mentioned


Produced by Vivace Media and recorded at Zoworking (best coworking in Florence)

If you love Florence's dark side as much as we do, send this to the friend who always wants the scary version of the story, and leave us a review. It genuinely helps.