A place in which people have really studied

Via dello Studio is a street in the historic center of Florence that goes from Via del Corso to Piazza del Duomo. The name “Via dello Studio” suggests that the headquarters of the first University of Florence stood on that street: the “Florentine Studio” founded in 1321, at the behest of the Republic of Florence, as a school of Higher Arts.

“…a public study of each science was created in Florence; and so officials were appointed to build a beautiful place suitable for this…”.

In the Ancient University of Florence, medical, scientific, literary, legal, philosophical and theological subjects were taught.

Pope Clement VI granted the same privileges enjoyed by other universities in 1348 to the “Studio Fiorentino”. The first degree in Theology was given on 9 December 1359. In 1364 it was declared an Imperial University by Charles IV.

In 1472 the Studio was suppressed and moved to Pisa on the initiative of Lorenzo the Magnificent, although the humanities continued to be taught in Florence.

Predecessors of the modern “Erasmus” were the so-called Wandering Clerics students who attended European universities (Paris, Bologna, Oxford, but also the “Studio” of Florence) acquiring culture and awareness such as to be pushed to an “intellectual awakening” within to the clerical world.

It was thus, in the Middle Ages, that joviality and the Goliards were born: cultured people not linked to the ecclesiastical environment, who knew how to enjoy the pleasures of life and who with their goliardic rhymes intoned mockery and derision aimed at the Church, opposing a hypocritical world that preached submission and blind obedience.