Sara Funaro: the first woman mayor in Florence, from supporting street children in Brazil to Palazzo Vecchio

After securing 43% of the vote in the first round a fortnight ago, the centre-left candidate Sara Funaro beat the centre-right candidate, former Uffizi director Eike Schmidt. She thus became the first woman mayor in Florence. A success that also took shape thanks to the support, in the runoff, of the M5s candidate, Lorenzo Masi, and the candidate of Iv, Stefania Saccardi, while Schmidt was able to count on the support of the 'reconstituted' Florentine and Tuscan DC.

An exponent of the reformist wing of the PD, Funaro picks up the baton of Dario Nardella , who in the European elections obtained almost 100,000 preferences, more than the PD secretary Elly Schlein in Tuscany. Born to a Catholic mother and father of the Jewish religion (the same one she embraced), she is the granddaughter of the mayor of the flood, the Christian Democrat Piero Bargellini. Born in 1976, Funaro entered politics in 2009 in the civic list of Matteo Renzi (on that occasion she was not elected), in 2014 she was councillor for Welfare and Health, Housing, Equal Opportunities, Welcoming and Integration in the Nardella junta. In 2019, with Nardella's encore, she was elected to the city council and reconfirmed again in the council with delegations to Welfare and Health, Immigration and Education. In December, she said she would run for mayor: on that occasion, the Pd assembly took the decision not to use the party's internal primaries.

Funaro graduated in Psychology in Florence and specialised in Psychotherapy with a four-year course in Clinical Psychology. She has worked as a clinical psychotherapist, as a trainer of staff and as a supervisor of organisations working with people from traumatic situations, especially migration situations.

The mayor of Florence has important experience in social work behind her. She started as a volunteer as a teenager with disabled girls and boys, continued working with minors, in mental health and addictions. Then she moved to Brazil, to Salvador Bahia, where she worked with street children and in psychiatric communities.