Fortezza da Basso: the Medici fortress and the working north
A pentagon fortress built to cow the city, the modern exhibition halls inside it, and the streets down to the station. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. The brick bastions
Start at the great sloped brick walls on the outside — the *Fortezza da Basso* was built by the Medici in the 1530s not to defend Florence but to control it, guns pointing inward. Walk along the base of a bastion; the sheer mass of the thing is the point, and it's free.

2. The Sangallo keep
The central tower, the oldest core, by the architect *Antonio da Sangallo the Younger*. It survives inside the modern complex like a stone full stop. You can usually walk into the grounds when an event isn't on — check the day before, as access depends on the fair calendar.

3. The exhibition halls
Inside the walls, the fortress is now Florence's main fair and trade-show ground — Pitti fashion, the artisan fairs, the chocolate one in autumn. Glass-and-steel halls dropped inside Renaissance ramparts, which is a stranger sight than it should be. Wander when there's no fair and it's eerily calm.

4. Viale Filippo Strozzi
The broad ring-road avenue along the fortress's north flank, plane-treed, busy, unmistakably the edge of the old city. Cross it for the full height of the walls from across the traffic — the best single view of the pentagon's scale.

5. The streets toward the station
Walk south through the working blocks behind the station — repair shops, cheap canteens, the unglamorous back of the city that keeps it running. No monuments here, and that's the relief after the centre. Drift toward the rail lines.

6. Santa Maria Novella station forecourt
End at *Giovanni Michelucci*'s 1934 station — a clean, low Rationalist building that was radical for its day and still reads modern. Stand in the forecourt and look back at it before you go in; most travellers never give it a glance.

Fortezza da Basso: the Medici fortress and the working north