At 6, Via de’ Benci, in an elegant Renaissance palace with an inside courtyard, is set one of the most refined and most unusual museums of the city: The Horne Museum (open 9 am to 1 pm daily, closed on Sundays). It is out of the official tours, that’s why you can enjoy a peaceful visit of it. Its rooms host the art collections of the eclectic English collector Herbert Percy Horne, a friend of Oscar Wilde and Dante Gabriele Rossetti: paintings, sculptures, pieces of furniture, instruments, a variety of objects, tools and a library also containing miniated manuscripts and incunabula, besides a lot of paintings of the Florentine school of the Trecento and the Renaissance, works imputable to Lorenzetti, Masaccio, Simone Martini, Filippino Lippi, some paintings by Tiepolo and – masterpiece of the museum – the picture of "Santo Stefano " painted on wood by Giotto.

In the small square named S.Remigio, besides the Alberti’s Tower and Loggia, the Peruzzi Arch, the Bardi’s Houses, the Visconti by Modrone’s Palace and the Neri Palace, is also one of the most ancient churches of Florence, dated back to 1040 and consecrated to S. Remigio, bishop of Reims. Originally founded as a hospital and orator for the French pilgrims, the church was rebuilt in 1350 and contains a "Madonna in trono" attributed to the famous Gaddo Gaddi (1280).

The Balestri-Wittum family has owned and operated the Hotel Balestri for over one hundred years, since 1888, when Fede Balestri was born and whose father, Giovanni from Rosia near Siena, a former greengrocer, began to manage this home. Since then four generations have followed one another and now they hold the record of the oldest hotel-keepers family in Florence. The Balestri still boasts of the style and the care of the “Art of Accomodating”, which was a real Florentine guild since the 13th century. "Granny Fede" was the real archetype of hotelier, whose style and charisma in accomodating guests went far away the simple commercial fact of selling rooms. "Granny Fede" passed through the damages and the following problems of two World Wars, but she had always been able to raise again with courage, charisma and with a great female ability of suggesting again her "House".

David H. Lawrence mentions the "Pension" (without naming it expressly) in his "Aaron's Rod" and we like to think that Fede Balestri could have been the maid showing the famous writer the way to his room. The hotel is like a home for the guest, so he expects to be welcomed with his needs, his fears and his "expectation of welcome". The true hotelier knows that the meeting with a guest is something special, with its contradictions, its questions and answers, its relationships, in a world that seems to privilege aggressiveness and divisions. This is the style and the bet for the staff at the Balestri today, where sons and nephews of “Granny Fede”, the founder, work with the original spirit of the House.