Florence

• 1. Introduction

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  Florence holds the greatest concentration of art in proportion to its size anywhere in the world, and some visitors react to it physically. Encountering the city's repositories of painting and sculpture, a few are said to experience Stendhal syndrome. This is a city of 361,625 people in the Italian region of Tuscany, founded as a Roman garrison in 59 BC for veteran soldiers. Its Latin name was Florentia, meaning the Flourishing Town. Many academics consider it the birthplace of the Renaissance. How did a settlement built in the style of an army camp become the place where opera and the piano were invented, where a single family produced popes and queens, and where the language of one poet became the language of a nation? The Arno river runs through it, alternately nourishing the city with commerce and destroying it by flood. Around its walls, tiny placards still mark how high the waters rose.

• 2. The Florin And The Bankers

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  Florentine money, in the form of the gold florin, financed industry across Europe from the late Middle Ages, reaching from Britain to Bruges, to Lyon and Hungary. The city's bankers financed the English kings during the Hundred Years' War. They also financed the papacy, paying for the construction of the provisional capital at Avignon and, after the popes returned, the rebuilding of Rome. By the year 1300 Florence had become a centre of textile production in Europe. Its primary resource was the Arno, which supplied power for the textile industry and access to the Mediterranean for international trade. Florentine merchants earned their reputation by bringing decisive financial innovation to medieval fairs. Among these were bills of exchange and the double-entry bookkeeping system. The growing power of the merchant elite culminated in an anti-aristocratic uprising led by Giano della Bella. It produced the Ordinances of Justice, which entrenched the power of the elite guilds until the end of the Republic. About 25,000 people were said to be supported by the city's wool industry, and in 1378 the wool combers, the ciompi, rose up in the Revolt of the Ciompi.

• 3. Rise Of The Medici

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  Cosimo de' Medici was the first member of his family to control Florence from behind the scenes. The city was technically a democracy of sorts, but his power flowed from a vast patronage network, his alliance with new immigrants known as the gente nuova, and the family's role as bankers to the pope. Cosimo was succeeded by his son Piero, and then in 1469 by his grandson Lorenzo. Lorenzo de' Medici, known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, was a great patron of the arts who commissioned works by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli. He was an accomplished poet and musician, and he brought composers and singers to Florence, including Alexander Agricola, Johannes Ghiselin, and Heinrich Isaac. After Lorenzo died in 1492, his son Piero II resisted the invading French king Charles VIII, then accepted humiliating terms once he saw the size of the French army at the gates of Pisa. The Florentines rebelled and expelled him, and with his exile in 1494 the first period of Medici rule ended. The family produced figures who reached far beyond the city. Two members became popes in the early 16th century, Leo X and Clement VII. Catherine de' Medici married King Henry II of France and ruled as regent after his death in 1559. Marie de' Medici married Henry IV of France and gave birth to the future King Louis XIII.

• 4. Savonarola And Machiavelli

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  Girolamo Savonarola became prior of the San Marco monastery in 1490, famed for penitential sermons that attacked what he saw as immorality and attachment to material riches. He praised the exile of the Medici as the work of God, punishing them for their decadence, and pushed through reforms toward a more democratic rule. When he publicly accused Pope Alexander VI of corruption, he was banned from speaking, and when he broke the ban he was excommunicated. The Florentines turned against him, arrested him, and convicted him as a heretic. He was hanged and burned on the Piazza della Signoria on the 23rd of May 1498, and his ashes were dispersed in the Arno. Niccolo Machiavelli was a political thinker of the same city, renowned for his handbook The Prince, a work about ruling and exercising power. The Medici commissioned him to write the Florentine Histories, the history of the city. His ideas on how rulers should govern spread across European courts and became known as Machiavellianism. The family he wrote for did not stay gone. In 1512 the Medici retook control with the help of Spanish and Papal troops, led by the cousins Giovanni and Giulio. Florentines drove them out a second time in 1527 and named Jesus Christ King of Florence, but the Medici returned in 1530 with the armies of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

• 5. From Grand Dukes To A Nation

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  Alessandro de' Medici was named Duke of the Florentine Republic in 1531, when Emperor Charles and Pope Clement made Florence officially a monarchy. His successor, Cosimo I de' Medici, became Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1569; in all Tuscany only the Republic of Lucca and the Principality of Piombino remained independent from Florence. The Medici monarchy lasted over two centuries until the death of Gian Gastone de' Medici in 1737. With the dynasty extinct, Francis Stephen, duke of Lorraine and husband of Maria Theresa of Austria, took the throne, bringing Tuscany temporarily under the Austrian crown. From 1801 to 1807 Florence was the capital of the Napoleonic client state, the Kingdom of Etruria. Tuscany was then annexed by France, and Florence served as the prefecture of the French departement of Arno from 1808 until the fall of Napoleon in 1814. The Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty, restored at the Congress of Vienna, was finally deposed in 1859, and Tuscany joined the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Florence replaced Turin as Italy's capital in 1865. To modernise the city, the old market in the Piazza del Mercato Vecchio and many medieval houses were pulled down and replaced by a formal street plan, with a large triumphal arch built at the west end of the widened square. The capital moved on to Rome six years later, in 1871.

• 6. The Language Of A Nation

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  Dante Alighieri, born in 1265, composed his Divine Comedy between 1306 and 1321 in the Florentine vernacular descended from Latin, rather than the Latin used for most literary works of the time. In the poem he takes an allegoric and moral tour of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, guided first by the Roman poet Virgil and later by Beatrice. The Florentine dialect, carried by such masterpieces, was adopted as the basis for a national literary language and forms the base of standard Italian. Petrarch led the literary scene alongside Giovanni Boccaccio after Dante's death in 1321. Petrarch was particularly known for his Canzoniere, the Book of Songs, where he conveyed his love for Laura, and his style became known as Petrarchism. Boccaccio is best known for the Decameron, a grim story set during the bubonic plague of the 1350s, in which people flee the ravaged city to an isolated country mansion and pass the time telling 100 distinct novellas. The prestige of these writers, together with Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini, made Florentine the language of culture throughout Italy.

• 7. Where Opera Was Born

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  Opera was invented in Florence in the late 16th century, when Jacopo Peri's Dafne, an opera in the style of monody, was premiered. The Florentine Camerata had convened in the mid-16th century and experimented with setting tales of Greek mythology to music and staging the result, producing the first operas. This set in motion not only the operatic form but later separate classical forms such as the symphony and concerto. From Florence opera spread throughout Italy and eventually Europe. Giulio Caccini, who lived from 1551 to 1618, wrote Le Nuove Musiche, significant for instruction in performance practice. The book specified the term monody, in use by the 1630s, describing the combination of voice and basso continuo and a way of stating text in a free, lyrical, speech-like manner. The piano was invented in Florence in 1709 by Bartolomeo Cristofori. Other composers and musicians who lived in the city include Piero Strozzi and Mike Francis, who lived from 1961 to 2009.

• 8. Cradle Of The Renaissance

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  Brunelleschi's dome dominates the Florentine skyline, and 600 years after its completion it remains the largest dome built in brick and mortar in the world. The Florentines decided to start building the cathedral late in the 13th century without a design for the dome, and the project Filippo Brunelleschi proposed was the largest ever built at the time. It was the first major dome built in Europe since Roman times, after the Pantheon in Rome and Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore, was begun in 1296 in the Gothic style to a design by Arnolfo di Cambio and was structurally completed by 1436. Michelangelo's David, created between 1501 and 1504, is housed in the Galleria dell'Accademia, perhaps the best-known work of art anywhere. The Uffizi Gallery, founded on a bequest from the last member of the Medici family, sold over 1.93 million tickets in 2014. The Piazza della Signoria has staged many turning points: in 1301 Dante was sent into exile from here, and on the 26th of April 1478 the Pazzi conspiracy murdered Giuliano di Piero de' Medici and wounded his brother Lorenzo. The conspirators who could be caught were hanged from the windows of the palace. The Ponte Vecchio, rebuilt in the 14th century and lined with shops on stilts, was the only bridge in the city to survive World War II intact. Hitler declared Florence an open city on the 3rd of July 1944, and it was liberated on the 4th of August 1944 by New Zealand, South African and British troops alongside partisans of the Tuscan Committee of National Liberation.