Turns out this has nothing to do with the plague, it’s even weirder than that - during the Renaissance, Florence didn’t collect any taxes on wine produced ‘for the family’. So obviously some of the city’s richest men decided they’d start selling their wines directly from their own homes instead of selling it through restaurants, thus making a lot more money (no taxes and no middle man). Wine could be bought by the bottle or by the glass, and the fact the customers didn’t set foot inside the house probably a) prevented theft and b) preserved the illusion that the place was not a place of trade.
Occasionally, alms for also left in there.
These ‘buchette del vino’ (literally ‘little wine holes’) are a typical Florentine phenomenon and had been in use until fairly recently; over the last decade people have started restorating and reopening them. There are about 170 of them around Florence. Here are a few ones:
not weird. in Italy, the reason is ALWAYS tax evasion
