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FLORENCE IN THE EARLY
MODERN WORLD
Florence in the Early Modern World offers new perspectives on this important city
by exploring the broader global context of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
within which the experience of Florence remains unique.
By exploring the city’s relationship to its close and distant neighbors, this col-
lection of interdisciplinary essays reveals the transnational history of Florence. The
chapters orient the lenses of the most recent historiographical turns perfected in
studies on Venice, Rome, Bologna, Naples, and elsewhere toward Florence. New
techniques, such as digital mapping, alongside new comparisons of architectural
theory and merchants in Eurasia, provide the latest perspectives about Florence’s
cultural and political importance before, during, and after the Renaissance. From
Florentine merchants in Egypt and India, through actual and idealized military
ambitions in the sixteenth-century Mediterranean, to Tuscan humanists in late
medieval England, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume reveal the con-
nections Florence held to early modern cities across the globe.
This book steers away from the historical narrative of an insular Renaissance
Europe and instead identifies the significance of other global influences. By using
Florence as a case study to trace these connections, this volume of essays provides
essential reading for students and scholars of early modern cities and the Renaissance.
Nicholas Scott Baker is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Macquarie

University, Australia. He is the author of The Fruit of Liberty: Political Culture in the
Florentine Renaissance, 1480–1550 (2013) and is completing a book on how Italians
thought about the future during the Renaissance.
Brian Jeffrey Maxson is Associate Professor of History at East Tennessee State

University, USA. He is the author of The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence
(2014) and is currently working on a study of the distinction and manipulation of
private and public conceptions in Renaissance Italy.
Themes in Medieval and Early Modern History
This is a brand new series which straddles both medieval and early modern worlds,
encouraging readers to examine historical change over time as well as promot-
ing understanding of the historical continuity between events in the past, and to
challenge perceptions of periodisation. It aims to meet the demand for conceptual
or thematic topics which cross a relatively wide chronological span (any period
between c. 500–1750), including a broad geographical scope.
Series Editor: Natasha Hodgson, Nottingham Trent University.
Available titles:
War in the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1600

Edited by Francisco García Fitz and João Gouveia Monteiro
Writing War in Britain and France, 1370–1854: A History of Emotions

Edited by Stephanie Downes, Andrew Lynch and Katrina O’Loughlin
Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Playmakers and their

Strategies
Nadia Thérèse van Pelt
Florence in the Early Modern World: New Perspectives

Nicholas Scott Baker and Brian Jeffrey Maxson
https://www.routledge.com/Themes-in-Medieval-and-Early-Modern-History/
book-series/TMEMH
FLORENCE IN THE EARLY
MODERN WORLD
New Perspectives
Edited by Nicholas Scott Baker and

Brian Jeffrey Maxson
First published 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
 2020 selection and editorial matter, Nicholas Scott Baker and Brian
Jeffrey Maxson; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Nicholas Scott Baker and Brian Jeffrey Maxson to be
identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Baker, Nicholas Scott, 1975- editor. | Maxson, Brian, 1978- editor.
Title: Florence in the early modern world : new perspectives / edited by
Nicholas Scott Baker and Brian Jeffrey Maxson.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series:
Themes in medieval and early modern history
Identifiers: LCCN 2019009734| ISBN 9781138313309 (hardback) | ISBN
9781138313316 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780429457685 (ebk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Florence (Italy)—History—1421-1737. | Florence
(Italy)—Foreign relations—1421-1737. | Florence (Italy)—Politics and
government—1421-1737. | Renaissance—Italy—Florence.
Classification: LCC DG737.4 .F58 2019 | DDC 945/.51107—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009734
ISBN: 978-1-138-31330-9 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-31331-6 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-45768-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
CONTENTS
List of tables vii

List of figures viii
Acknowledgments x
About the contributors xi
1 Where in the world is Renaissance Florence? Challenges

for the history of the city after the global turn 1
PART I
Economic perspectives 19
2 Taking architectural theory on the road: the sliding scales

of the Florentine traveler 21
Niall Atkinson
3 “Tutto il mondo è paese”: locating Florence in premodern

Eurasian commerce 50
Nicholas Scott Baker
4 Mapping gendered labor in the textile industry of

early modern Florence 68
Nicholas Terpstra
5 Shaping the city and the landscape: politics, public space,

and innovation under Ferdinando I de’ Medici 92
Marta Caroscio
vi Contents
PART II
Political perspectives 115
6 Nelle parti di Romagna: the role and influence of the

Apennine lords in Italian Renaissance politics 117
Luciano Piffanelli
7 The advantages of stability: Medici Tuscany’s ambitions

in the Eastern Mediterranean 142
Brian Brege
8 The Medici, maritime empire, and the enduring legacy

of the Cavalieri di Santo Stefano 156
Katherine Poole-Jones
PART III
Cultural perspectives 187
9 Poggio’s beginnings at the papal curia: the Florentine

brain drain and the fashioning of the humanist
movement 189
Clémence Revest
10 The myth of the Renaissance bubble: international culture

and regional politics in fifteenth-century Florence 213
Brian Jeffrey Maxson
11 New perspectives on patria: the Andreini performance

of Florentine citizenship 236
Sarah Gwyneth Ross
Index 256
TABLES
2.1 1338: Villani’s Florence: a machine for living 25

2.2 1384: Alessandria Nuova, Frescobaldi, Sigoli, Gucci 33
4.1 Females in Florentine censuses, 1551–1688 70
4.2 Gender and age in the Florentine silk industry: 1663 74
4.3 Populations in charitable enclosures: 1632 77
4.4 Textile work in Florence: gendered labor in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century censuses 81
FIGURES
2.1 Map of Florence showing the fourteenth-century wall

circuit and Villani’s ideal axes 24
2.2 Sample succession of Benedetto Dei’s descriptions of the
streets in his neighborhood 28
2.3 Alexandria. Pietro del Massaio, from Ptolemy’s Geography,
Paris BNF Lat. 4802, 1475–80 31
2.4 Egypt. Pietro del Massaio, from Ptolemy’s Geography,
Paris BNF Lat. 4802, 1475–80 34
2.5 Cairo. Pietro del Massaio, from Ptolemy’s Geography,
Paris BNF Lat. 4802, 1475–80 35
2.6 Jerusalem. Pietro del Massaio, from Ptolemy’s Geography,
Paris BNF Lat. 4802, 1475–80 36
2.7 Church of the Ascension, Jerusalem and Florentine baptistery,
Marco di Bartolommeo Rustici, c. 1440s 37
2.8 Damascus. Pietro del Massaio, from Ptolemy’s Geography,
Paris BNF Lat. 4802, 1475–80 38
2.9 Adrianapolis. Pietro del Massaio, from Ptolemy’s
Geography, Paris BNF Lat. 4802, 1475–80 40
2.10 Constantinople. Pietro del Massaio, from Ptolemy’s
Geography, Paris BNF Lat. 4802, 1475–80 41
2.11 Norcia and environs 42
2.12 Lago Freddissimo. Bonsignore Bonsignori, Florence,
BNCF Magl. XIII, 93, f. 108v 43
4.1 Female-headed households in Florence (1561) 69
4.2 Textile worker households in Florence (1561) 74
4.3 Female textile workers’ households in Florence (1561) 75
Figures ix
4.4 Female winders (“incanna”) by street in Florence (1632) 84

4.5 Female spinners (“fila”) by street in Florence (1632) 84
4.6 Female weavers (“tesse”) by street in Florence (1632) 85
4.7 Females and males working in wool or silk by street in
Florence (1632) 85
4.8 Female and male weavers by street in Florence (1632) 86
5.1 Giambologna and his workshop, Equestrian Sculpture of
Cosimo I de’ Medici 93
5.2 Baccio Bandinelli, Sculpture of Giovanni dalle Bande Nere 94
5.3 Paolo Uccello, John Hawkwood 95
5.4 Giambologna and Pietro Tacca, Equestrian Sculpture of Ferdinando I 97
5.5 Pietro Francavilla (Spring), Giovanni Caccini (Summer
and Autumn) and Taddeo Landini (Winter), sculptures of
the four seasons 98
5.6 Pietro Francavilla, Ferdinando I as Grand Master of the Holy
Order of St. Stephen 99
5.7 Porcellana dei Medici (Medici porcelain) 102
5.8 Giovanni Bandini and Pietro Tacca, Sculpture of Ferdinando I 106
8.1 Giorgio Vasari and assistants, Apotheosis of Cosimo I 157
8.2 View of the nave, Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri, Pisa 161
8.3 Domenico Passignano, The Investiture of Cosimo I as Grand
Master of the Order of Santo Stefano 162
8.4 Bernardino Poccetti, The Conquest of Bona 163
8.5 Giovanni Bandini and Pietro Tacca, Monument to Ferdinando I 164
8.6 Anastagio Fontebuoni, Apotheosis of Cosimo I 166
8.7 Ottavio Vannini, Scenes from the Life of Francesco I 167
8.8 Detail of Neptune, ca. 1621–1623, fresco 168
8.9 Matteo Rosselli, The Fortification of the Port of Livorno 169
8.10 Matteo Rosselli, The Prisoners of Bona Presented to Ferdinando I 170
8.11 Female figure representing the Order of Santo Stefano with
chained captive, detail of Rosselli, The Prisoners of Bona
Presented to Ferdinando I 171
8.12 Fabrizio Boschi, Cosimo II Reawakens Painting and Science 172
8.13 Courtyard of Villa della Petraia, Florence 173
8.14 Volterrano (Baldassare Franceschini), The Triumphal Entry of
Cosimo into Siena 174
8.15 Volterrano (Baldassare Franceschini), Cosimo I Transferring the
Rule of Tuscany to Francesco I 175
8.16 Volterrano (Baldassare Franceschini), The Sea Triumph of
Ferdinando I 176
8.17 Volterrano (Baldassare Franceschini), Cosimo II Receives the
Victors of Bona 177
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank all the participants in the panels and the roundtable
discussion held at the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting in 2016,
as well as the audiences at those sessions, who started the conversations that
developed into this book. Some of the papers presented at those original panels
have already appeared in print elsewhere, and so do not appear here. We are
grateful to the contributors who joined the project later, for their willingness to
get involved. We would like to thank all the contributors for their collegiality
and enthusiasm for the volume, which made its publication possible. We would
also like to thank Morwenna Scott, Zoe Forbes and Laura Pilsworth at Taylor &
Francis, production editor Lizzie Kent, and copy editor Rachel Carter for their
invaluable help in bringing the volume into print.
Nicholas Scott Baker would like to thank Brian for his intellectual labor and
companionship and his tireless work on so many editorial tasks. He would also
like to thank Clare Monagle for her perceptive critique and Elena Calvillo for
her support.
Brian Jeffrey Maxson would like to thank Nic Baker, whose ideas and rigor
have challenged him to be a better historian, specifically on this project, but in
general for over fifteen years. He would like to thank the Department of History,
the School of Graduate Studies, and the Research and Development Council at
East Tennessee State University for their temporal and financial support of his
work on this project. He would also like to thank his graduate assistant, Keri Blair,
for her indispensable help with editing. Finally, he would like to thank his parents,
Ron and Cathy, his daughter Alex, and his wife, Jennifer, for their continued
patience and support.
CONTRIBUTORS
Niall Atkinson is Associate Professor of Art History and the College at the
University of Chicago. He is the author of several articles investigating the experi-
ence of space and the reception of architecture in the Italian Renaissance and a
monograph entitled The Noisy Renaissance: Sound, Architecture, and Florentine Urban
Life (2016). His current interests concern a digital mapping consortium of projects
concerned with reconstructing Renaissance Florence and a new book on the prob-
lem of getting lost in strange places and foreign cities through an analysis of the
geographic imagination of Renaissance culture.
Nicholas Scott Baker is Senior Lecturer in early modern European history at
Macquarie University, in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of The Fruit of Liberty:
Political Culture in the Florentine Renaissance, 1480–1550 (2013), several articles
and book chapters, and is the co-editor with Brian Jeffrey Maxson of After Civic
Humanism: Learning and Politics in Renaissance Italy (2015). He is currently complet-
ing a book on how Italians thought about the future during the Renaissance.
Brian Brege is Assistant Professor of History at Syracuse University where he
teaches courses on Renaissance Italy. His Stanford University dissertation
The Empire That Wasn’t: The Grand Duchy of Tuscany and Empire, 1574–1609 won the
Ezio Cappadocia Prize for best unpublished manuscript. The namesake book that
grew out of the dissertation is being prepared for publication.
Marta Caroscio studied at the Universities of Florence, London, and Siena, com-
pleting her PhD in Medieval Archaeology at the University of Siena in 2007.
She has been a Fellow in Museum Studies at the Museo Nacional de la Cerámica
“González Martí” in Valencia and at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center
for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. Her book The Renaissance on the Table:
Material Culture of Eating in Florence is expected in 2019.
xii Contributors
Brian Jeffrey Maxson is Associate Professor of History at East Tennessee State

University. He is the author of The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence (2014),
and most recently co-editor of Languages of Power in Italy (1300–1600) (2017). He is
currently working on a synthetic history of Florence and a monographic study of the
distinction and manipulation of private and public conceptions in Renaissance Italy.
Luciano Piffanelli is Adjunct Research Professor at the Centre for Advanced Study
in the Renaissance of the University of Tours, and has directed the Department of
History at the Catholic Institute of Toulouse. He is interested in European politics
and diplomacy on a broad scale (fourteenth–seventeenth century), and has published
essays on political languages, Italian Renaissance state-building, and peacemaking in
Europe. His second monograph, ‘Contra et adversus dominus duce Mediolani’: Politique
et diplomatie en Italie à l’aube de la Renaissance, explores the diplomatic strategies of
the Italian powers during the Florentine wars against Filippo Maria Visconti, and is
going to be published in the Collection de l’École française de Rome.
Katherine Poole-Jones is Associate Professor of Art History at Southern Illinois
University, Edwardsville. Poole-Jones was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship
to Italy in 2005–6 and is the author of several previous publications on the Medici
family and the Cavalieri di Santo Stefano. Her forthcoming essay “A Tale of Two
Removals: Public Monuments and Civil War Memory in St. Louis” in Monumental
Troubles (2019) is part of a new scholarly trajectory focusing on the public monu-
ments of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Saint Louis, Missouri.
Clémence Revest is a cultural and social historian of Europe during the Renaissance,
with particular interests in the development of the humanist movement and the use
of a new rhetoric in fifteenth-century Italy. She is a permanent researcher at the
French National Center for Scientific Research and a member of the Centre Roland
Mousnier in the Sorbonne University. She has published several articles and chapters
about humanists at the papal chancery and the university of Padua, classicizing
rhetorical practices, and the fashioning of humanist identity at the beginning of the
Quattrocento, and is a co-editor of the forthcoming volume, L’humanisme à l’épreuve
de l’Europe (XVe–XVIe siècles). Histoire d’une transmutation Culturelle (2019).
Sarah Gwyneth Ross is Professor and Chair of the History Department at Boston
College. Her recent publications include The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect
in Renaissance Italy and England (2009) and Everyday Renaissances: The Quest for
Cultural Legitimacy in Venice (2016), the latter of which won the 2018 Society
of Italian Historical Studies’ Marraro Prize. Currently she is at work on a multi-
generational study of the Andreini family and their milieu.
Nicholas Terpstra is Professor of History at the University of Toronto working at
the intersections of politics, charity, gender, and religion in early modern Italy. He
is also engaged in a digital mapping project on sixteenth-century Florence. Recent
publications include Religious Refugees of the Early Modern World (2015) and Mapping
Space, Sense and Movement in Florence (2016).
1
WHERE IN THE WORLD IS
RENAISSANCE FLORENCE?
Challenges for the history of the city
after the global turn
In 1592, the Veronese artist Jacopo Ligozzi completed two large-scale paintings
on slate for Grand Duke Ferdinando I de’ Medici for what is now the Salone
del Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio. One image depicted the grand-ducal
coronation of Cosimo I by Pope Pius V, an event that had occurred almost three
decades earlier. The other presented a partly fictional, partly historical assertion of
Florence’s place in the world. The foreground depicts the moment, some three
hundred years earlier, when Pope Boniface VIII realized that the twelve ambas-
sadors before him, each representing a different ruler, were all Florentine. This
recognition famously prompted the pontiff to declare that Florentines constituted
a fifth element in the universe. In the background, Ligozzi created a fictional
painting—a painting within a painting—to adorn the wall of the reception hall.
The scene presented Florence, crowned and robed, attended by the four known
continents: Africa, America, Asia, and Europe. The inclusion of America repre-
sented an anachronism in the foreground’s fourteenth-century scene, but it testi-
fied to the literal and figurative ambitions of the ruling grand duke. The painting
constituted an assertion of the reach and significance of Florence in the emerging
Atlantic world and global economy. Florence and the Medici, Ligozzi’s image
claimed, were players on the world stage. Florentines were, indeed, the quintes-
sence of the world.
Despite the pre-eminence of Florence in twentieth-century analyses of
Renaissance Italy, Anglophone scholarship has remained largely silent on the global
significance asserted for the city in Ligozzi’s painting, until very recently.1 Instead,
scholars focused on Florentine significance in narratives of modernity and Western
civilization. Building upon the richness of the Archivio di Stato, the Biblioteca
Nazionale, and many other libraries and archives in Florence, scholars revealed the
intricacies of pre-modern urban life in vivid detail. The very wealth of these repos-
itories made the city particularly appealing and salient to the new social historical
2 Nicholas Scott Baker & Brian Jeffrey Maxson
analysis that began to emerge in the mid-twentieth century. The spectacular cul-
tural heritage of the city produced between 1300 and 1600—the treasury of visual
art, architecture, and literature—further enhanced its appeal as an object of analysis,
as well as suggesting its significance to the broader canon of Western civilization.
Books, articles, and papers in English on Florence and Florentine topics prolifer-
ated in the years after 1940. A simple ngram using Google’s Ngram Viewer—with
all its attendant limitations noted—crudely illustrates the relative predominance of
“Renaissance Florence” in books published in English between 1960 and 1980,
and its continuing pre-eminence up to the end of the century despite the rise in
appearance of “Renaissance Venice” and “Renaissance Rome.”2
Within this basic context fits the origins of this volume, specifically in a chance
remark overheard at the Renaissance Society of America’s Annual Meeting in
2011: “Do we really need another panel on Florence?” The specific prompt behind
this indignation at yet another conference session on the Tuscan city remains
unknown. Perhaps it was a general sense of malaise at Florence’s apparently con-
tinuing dominance in Anglophone scholarship, combined with a feeling that this
was squeezing out research on other places. Alternatively, it might have been a
belief that no interesting or compelling questions were left to ask about Florence.
Both explanations rest upon an assumption that the Tuscan city has been overtaken
by developments in historiography and has little to contribute to the recent turn
toward global and transnational perspectives. Accordingly, we organized a series of
panels for the same conference in 2016, held that year in Boston, which attempted
to explore this premise. The participants were asked to think about where Florence
might fit in global and transnational histories of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance,
and early modernity, to consider what the city on the Arno might contribute to
such discussions, and to reflect on how (if at all) its history might look different
considered in a wider perspective.
The issues at stake have significance for scholars of Florence, the Renaissance,
and the early modern world more broadly. For so long a keystone in Anglophone
scholarship and historical understanding of Renaissance Italy, an increasingly
common assumption among scholars (outside the circle of Florentine special-
ists) seems to be that the Tuscan city has been overtaken by developments in
historiography. It has appeared increasingly left-behind by the shifts toward
Mediterranean, transnational, and global perspectives on the history of the pen-
insula. In actual fact, however, in recent years many historians have begun to
challenge the notion of Florence’s historical insularity, so broadening its his-
toriography accordingly. Studies on the fourteenth century have included the
activities of Florentine mercantile networks across Europe as well as the appeal of
Tuscan writers and humanist interests in many different places.3 For the fifteenth
century, recent scholarship has begun to situate Florentine internal political
conflicts within a broader Italian and even European framework.4 Florentines
abroad—merchants, soldiers, pilgrims, emigrants, and others—have also attracted
interest.5 Other scholars, such as Sean Roberts, have identified and analyzed
networks of cultural and intellectual exchanges between Florence and the courts
Where in the world is Renaissance Florence? 3
of the Ottoman Empire and transalpine monarchs.6 One intriguing recent study
publishes the letter collection of a Portuguese abbot living in fifteenth-century
Florence, illustrative of the connections between the Atlantic kingdom and the
Tuscan city.7 Such connections have been the most enduring focus for historical
research into Renaissance Florence’s links with the wider world. Over several
decades European scholars—Federigo Melis, Charles Verlinden, Virginia Rau,
and others—have revealed the extensive presence of Florentines in the Iberian
imperial and commercial expansion into Asia and the Americas from the late
fifteenth century; beyond the well-known Amerigo Vespucci.8
For the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scholarly interest has also turned
toward situating Florence within broader European and global contexts. Notable
examples include Carlos Plaza’s examination of cultural exchange between Spain
and the Medici capital; and Stefano Dall’Aglio’s demonstration of the pan-European
entanglements of what appeared an internecine Florentine political struggle.9 Lia
Markey has traced the multiple ways that the New World became integrated into
the cultural and intellectual worlds of the Tuscan city. Similarly, the contributors
to the Medici Archive Project’s The Grand Ducal Medici and the Levant have thrown
new light on the extensive contacts—political, economic, and cultural—that
the city enjoyed with the Ottoman Empire (and beyond) in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Corey Tazzara, meanwhile, has demonstrated the important
place of the port city of Livorno—the Medici grand dukes’ great experiment in
free trade—in Mediterranean commerce and early modern economic thought.10
As Sean Roberts’ important, recent essay has also reminded scholars, how-
ever, the idea of a “global Florence” has an even longer history, with significant
studies that identified actual or imagined connections to the world appear-
ing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.11 The global reach of
Renaissance Florence is not a purely twenty-first-century discovery. Indeed, in
turning to consider the place of the Tuscan city in broader horizons, the new
generation is following in the footsteps of previous scholars. Quite why this
earlier interest in the Tuscan city’s broader horizons lost precedence is unclear.
Very probably, it did so because the city proved so productive for other historical
interests—especially those pertaining to the social, political, and economic life
of pre-modern Europe—that the need to assert its wider connections was less
pressing than it might otherwise have been.
For this reason, perhaps, the overall impression of the Anglophone scholarship
of Florence from the mid-to-late twentieth century, and even into the twenty-first,
remains largely that it is insular in its focus; notwithstanding all the recent works
mentioned above, as well as others. As the comment overheard in 2011 anecdo-
tally suggests, current historiographical trends simply seem to fit other locales in
Italy better than Florence. Venice, for example, possessed a maritime empire that
extended through the Adriatic Sea into the eastern Mediterranean, necessitating a
constant process of interaction and exchange with the Greek and Islamic cultures
and societies of those regions; as well as with other western European powers
such as the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs.12 Rome, as the seat of the papacy, lay
at the center of a vast network of cultural, political, and financial exchanges and
contacts from the Middle Ages. Increasingly in the sixteenth century it acquired
importance as the hub for the spread of the global Catholic Reformation, and as a
key site of contestation between the French and Spanish monarchies for hegemony
in Italy and Europe.13 Other cities such as Milan, Naples, and Genoa, by virtue
of their long histories of interaction and entanglement with non-Italian dynasties
have also provided important loci for transnational perspectives on Renaissance
Italy.14 Despite the legacy of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars
and new studies aimed at transnational connections between Florence and the late
medieval and early modern worlds, scholars continue to underestimate the exchanges
between Florence and the world beyond its dominion.
This volume aims to assist in rectifying this image and to contribute to the
growing conversation by adding new perspectives to the ways that Renaissance
Florence engaged with, and was engaged by, the wider world from the fifteenth
to the seventeenth centuries. It brings to bear multiple perspectives that emphasize
what the distant and the recent studies on the city’s global links have demonstrated:
that Florence was far from isolated or insular during the period. The contributions
to this volume argue, cumulatively, that Florence too belongs in the new, global
historiography of the early modern world. They do so not by a series of compari-
sons or contrasts in the tradition of many previous studies (which have considered
questions about “Florence and . . .”) but instead seek new perspectives on Florence
within the broader context and bigger picture of the world of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries: perspectives on Florence from afar, perspectives on the world
from Florence, perspectives that draw the eye to the ways in which the experiences
of Florence fit within broader patterns while still remaining unique.
The essays trace out a clear dynamic of changing engagement across the period
of the Renaissance. In the early fifteenth century, while the city’s political reach
and concerns remained almost exclusively local and regional, its cultural and com-
mercial contacts extended significantly further, east to the Levant and north to
England. Between the mid-sixteenth century and the third decade of the seven-
teenth, the political ambitions and interests of Florence’s rulers expanded to match
the span of its economic, intellectual, and artistic engagement, as the Medici grand
dukes turned their attention to the eastern Mediterranean and the Americas. By the
mid-seventeenth century, however, both the commercial and political influence of
the Tuscan city, beyond Italy, were in decline. But its cultural reach remained as
significant as it had been two hundred years earlier.
This importance of situating the Tuscan city within global perspectives and
in relation to its neighbors, both near and far, lies in the very pre-eminence that
Renaissance Florence has enjoyed in English-speaking scholarship and popular
imagination. The visual and intellectual cultures of the city between the fourteenth
and sixteenth centuries have been central to the constitution of the stories that the
West has told itself about itself: stories of modernity, rationality, progress, and indi-
vidual genius. Left as an insular history, rather than integrated into a broader global
perspective, these stories of Renaissance Florence could continue to reproduce a
narrative of Europe creating its own genius, alone and unconnected to the rest of
the world. Moving on from this perspective is a pressing concern not just for his-
torical research but also for teaching. In twenty-first-century universities, teachers of
Renaissance studies need to identify the relevance and significance of their subject
in a globalized world or risk its marginalization.
Questions about how to place Renaissance Florence in a global perspective
require some consideration. Caution or skepticism in the face of what seem like
scholarly trends is always admirable.15 The global turn, however, is less a scholarly
trend and more the logical endpoint of a long process of decentering, which the
practice of European history has undergone from the mid-twentieth century. This
process has progressively shifted historians’ focus from the actions of kings and finan-
ciers to the lives of ordinary workers and peasants (via social history); to the lives of
women of all social strata (via women’s and gender history); and to the perspectives
of non-Europeans (via post-colonial history and subaltern studies).16 The practical end-
point of such decentering is, in the memorable phrasing of Dipesh Chakrabarty, the
provincializing of Europe: the displacement of Europe and the European past as a uni-
versal measure of modernity and progress.17 Such provincialization does not mean
abandoning the study of Europe’s past or the scholarship of past generations, but it
does necessitate a re-orientation of perspectives toward a less insular approach. The
turn toward global and transnational histories is valuable and important for scholars
of all periods of Europe’s past because of the focus on exchanges and connections,
on the myriad ways that European experiences interacted with, were shaped by, and
shaped in turn those of peoples and cultures from Asia, Africa, and (after 1492) the
Americas.18 As a key center in traditional European historical narratives, the inclu-
sion of Florence in this turn is crucial.
The shift toward de-centered histories of Europe offers a serious opportunity
to reconsider profound and fundamental questions about the nature of History as a
discipline, its imbrication with European modernity, and about periodization. It also
provides an opening to reconsider the nature of Europe and what might actually be
distinctly European about its cultures and societies.19 For Florence, a de-centered
approach might involve considering Renaissance culture as a product of global
exchanges and connections as well as of Italian concerns with classical antiquity and
political legitimacy; that is, considering the Renaissance as the product of a period
when a particularly rich nexus of connections converged on the Italian peninsula.20
It would, moreover, consider how the intellectual and artistic culture of the city—
and of the Italian peninsula—contributed to the Europeanization of Europe, again
by a process of exchanges and connections within and beyond Italy.
The phrase “the Europeanization of Europe” was coined by the medieval-
ist Robert Bartlett to describe the complex process by which Latin Europe became
increasingly culturally homogeneous between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.21
We use it here in a manner also influenced by Peter Burke’s consideration of the
history of Europe as a collective consciousness, deepening and extending Bartlett’s
conception.22 If by the fourteenth century, Europe’s Latin medieval civilization had
acquired a set of characteristics in common, this process only increased in the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. In spite of centrifugal forces—the increasing

use of vernacular languages in preference to Latin and the sectarian divides created
by the reformations of religion—the idea of Europe as a category of identity based
on a shared culture became increasingly widespread in the early modern period; for
educated and urban Europeans at least.23 The spread of the Renaissance as a cultural
and intellectual movement—in particular the humanist conviction of the benefits of
an education in the studia humanitatis and the aesthetic preference for the naturalism
of the classical visual style—constituted a key element in the deepening of Europe’s
shared cultural identity. Historical consideration of what might or might not be par-
ticular about Europe’s culture and past is a crucial step in de-centering the continent’s
history. It designates European history as particular only to Europe, rather than as a
universal human experience.
The contributions to this volume examine economic, political, and cultural
exchanges and connections that linked Florence to neighbors both near and
far. Contributors look at questions both of Renaissance Florence’s role in the
Europeanization of Europe during the early modern period, and of the ways in
which exchanges and connections beyond Europe contributed to the culture and
society of the city. The global Florence of the Renaissance revealed in their analy-
ses rested upon the economic foundations of the medieval commercial revolution.
The first part of the book, therefore, considers economic perspectives. By the
early fourteenth century, Florentine merchant-bankers had established a network
that extended across Europe and the Mediterranean basin.24 The resulting pros-
perity led to demographic growth, transforming the city into the largest urban
center in Tuscany. The city’s enormous new ring of walls—completed in 1333 and
still partly extant—attest to its late medieval wealth and size. In this period, Pope
Boniface VIII allegedly pronounced Florentines to be the fifth element; the event
celebrated by Ligozzi’s 1592 painting. While the mega-banks of the Peruzzi and
the Bardi collapsed in the mid-1300s, the Florentine mercantile network remained
a fixture of the European economy throughout the period of the Renaissance,
making the city an important node in an expanding global marketplace.25
The first chapter in this part addresses not the practice of commerce, but the
ways that practices of measuring and accounting helped Florentine merchants
to make sense of both their own city and the world. Niall Atkinson traces the
connections between a mercantile quantifying mentality and the architectural
principles codified by Leon Battista Alberti. He analyzes descriptions of distant
cities and spaces left by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century merchants to reveal how
Renaissance Florentines used architecture to mediate cross-cultural exchanges and
encounters, and to orient themselves in foreign locales. The measurement of time
and space, honed from commercial necessity, helped Florentine merchants abroad
to comprehend the cities, cultures, and societies they encountered, and to locate
themselves within physical (both natural and man-made) and sacred geographies.
The next chapter also examines how mercantile practices provided points of ori-
entation for Florentines abroad. Nicholas Scott Baker considers the writings of Filippo
Sassetti, a merchant and humanist who, in the late sixteenth century, traveled first to
the Iberian peninsula, and then to the Malabar coast of south-west India. Baker argues
that Sassetti identified a shared mercantile culture across Eurasia, linking Florence into
a global network of commerce and common practices and used this to explain what
he saw to correspondents back in Italy. For all its apparent provinciality, compared
with the major Atlantic and Mediterranean commercial ports, the Tuscan city was
always connected to the wider world.
The third chapter in this part shifts perspective from the transcontinental to the
local, and from the traditional to the digital. Nicholas Terpstra mines the possibili-
ties of the University of Toronto’s DECIMA Project to analyze how demographic
patterns in Florence responded to changes in the emerging global economy during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He examines, at a fine-grained level, the
social and economic transformations that followed the shift in Florentine textile
production from wool to silk. This transition witnessed more women entering the
labor force. However, the profits of the silk industry did not circulate as broadly
as those of wool, and its growth led to falls in real incomes and the relocation
and increasing institutionalization of its female-dominated workforce. Shifts in the
emergent global economy, Terpstra’s analysis reveals, had significant local impacts.
The final contribution to the part on economic perspectives also considers
the impact of Florence’s engagement with the early modern global economy
on the city and on the landscape of Tuscany. Marta Caroscio considers the
intertwining of political and economic policies during the reign of Ferdinando
I de’ Medici by analyzing how the third grand duke imposed his family’s image
on the physical landscape. She highlights the myriad ways that both permanent
and ephemeral decorations emphasized the power of the Medici and Florence’s
position at the center of a transcontinental trade network. Semi-precious stones,
sugar, porcelain, American silver, and Asian textiles shifted from exotic luxuries
to everyday commodities that served to demonstrate the significance and rel-
evance of the ruling dynasty.
As Caroscio’s chapter highlights, economic and political power intertwined in
Renaissance Florence. Economics combined with geography to create a unique
political and cultural dynamic within Florence that had major ramifications for the
city’s global influence during the Renaissance; accordingly, the second part exam-
ines political perspectives. The political history of the city has enjoyed prominence
in English-language scholarship covering the period from the creation of the
guild-based civic republic in the late thirteenth century through to its collapse at
the end of the 1520s. More recently, the period of the Medici principate that suc-
ceeded the republican state has received increasing attention.26 Florence’s wealth
and its aggressive expansion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as well as
its location near the center of the Italian peninsula, gave the city prominence and
influence in regional politics. As both a republic and later a principality, Florence’s
role in the intensely competitive geopolitics of Italy necessitated exchanges and
connections with a wide range of players, near and far. The city’s governors
needed to maintain relationships with a constantly revolving cast of political allies,
opponents, and interested parties: the competing Angevin (both Hungarian and
French lines) and Aragonese claimants to the kingdom of Naples, the French and
various Spanish monarchies, Ottoman sultans, and German emperors, in addition
to neighboring Italian states. While the Florentines’ concerns were often local
and regional in their focus, they operated within a much larger political field that
extended from the Atlantic Ocean to the Levant.
The first chapter in this part examines the interaction between Florence and
near neighbors, highlighting the extent of Florence’s usual sphere of influence in
the early fifteenth century. Through a case study of Florentine diplomatic politics
in the Romagna, Luciano Piffanelli shows the importance of Florence within pen-
insular politics in the early Quattrocento. However, Piffanelli’s detailed narrative
also shows the limitations of the Florentine political sphere of influence within the
same period. Debates and investments focused on geographical neighbors, while
conflicts were regional and fought nearby. As such, the essay elegantly demon-
strates the relatively parochial nature of Florentine politics in the early fifteenth
century. Unlike the Neapolitans, the Romans, Venetians, or Milanese themselves,
the Florentine state neither possessed extensive territories overseas nor did it abut
lands outside the Italian peninsula. It was a powerful Italian state in political dia-
logue primarily with other Italians. But this dialogue helped to construct political
ideas about territory and spheres of influence that Europeans would eventually
apply to non-European polities.
One century later, the Florentine political orientation had dramatically changed,
as the second chapter in this part demonstrates. Brian Brege examines the largely
untold story of Florentine military adventurism in the eastern Mediterranean from
the mid-sixteenth to early seventeenth century. Florence, he suggests, was for a
brief moment an active, militant participant in Europe’s first global imperial age.
By the first decade of the seventeenth century, Florentine ships exploited Ottoman
preoccupations with the Safavids and internal problems by launching almost annual
raids on the north African coast and into the Aegean Sea. Following the death of
Ferdinando I de’ Medici, however, this aggressive posture weakened. The out-
break of the Thirty-Years War and the related bellicose situation on the Italian
peninsula ended this window of Florentine military ambitions abroad.
While Florentine politics retreated back to more regional military and political
concerns from the 1610s, the next chapter in this part argues that the Medici con-
tinued to project the city and themselves as central to Mediterranean-wide conflicts
through artistic patronage. Katherine Poole-Jones demonstrates how Grand Duke
Ferdinando I established a coherent iconographical program for the Order of Santo
Stefano, which was continued by his sons after their father’s death. Images of the
Order showed Tuscan naval and military might, and projected a grand-ducal identity
tied to conceptions of chivalry and militant Christianity. The grand-ducal family,
even after the peak of Florentine adventurism abroad, continued to use this visual
discourse. However, by the mid-seventeenth century, images of Medici might across
the Mediterranean bore few ties to contemporary diplomatic, political, or military
situations. This represented, in some ways, a return to a distinctive political and
cultural disconnect that had marked the early fifteenth century.
Already by the first decade of the fifteenth century, the cultural impact of
Florence was notably stronger than its inhabitants’ political reach. The final part
of the book considers cultural perspectives.27 Here the focus is far more upon
Florence’s role in the Europeanization of Europe—on exchanges and connec-
tions with near neighbors that helped to create Europe during the early modern
period—than on the cross-cultural influences and connections examined in the
first two parts. The Tuscan city has long enjoyed prominence as a creative engine
for the development of Renaissance culture. It claimed Petrarch and Boccaccio
as its own, as part of an early trinity of literary prowess with Dante. Under the
inspiration and guidance of Coluccio Salutati, Florence became one of the early
centers for the development of the humanist literary and cultural movement.
Similarly, many of the earliest works in the revived classical naturalism associ-
ated with the Renaissance were created in the city during the first decades of
the fifteenth century by artists and architects such as Lorenzo Ghiberti, Filippo
Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Masaccio. Quite why such an intense cultural efflo-
rescence occurred in Florence within the space of two or three generations remains
one of the key questions for Renaissance scholarship. Whatever its causes, the city
on the Arno played a key role in the emergence of arguably the most influential
and enduring cultural movement of the early modern period in Europe: the revival
of the classical point of view in both literature and visual arts.28
The first chapter in this part de-centers Florence from this narrative to
consider how Renaissance humanism developed through a dynamic series of
exchanges between the Tuscan city and Rome. Building on earlier research
by George Holmes, Clémence Revest provides new details on the role of
Florentines in the papal curia during the Western Schism. By 1403, Poggio
Bracciolini had left the tutelage of Coluccio Salutati and gone to make a career
under Pope Boniface IX. In Rome he enjoyed rapid promotion through the
curial ranks under a succession of popes. He was not alone. After his arrival in
1405, Leonardo Bruni likewise quickly rose to a position of rank and responsi-
bility. Other Florentines, too, filled out a circle of learned humanists who took
their pens to the pope. Through an examination of their lives and activities,
Revest proposes that what scholars have called Florentine humanism emerged
as much outside of the Tuscan city as within its walls.
In the decades that followed, even as the city’s politics remained largely con-
stricted to regional concerns, humanist texts by Florentines found an audience
abroad. In the second chapter in this part, Brian Jeffrey Maxson challenges the
historiographical tradition that has identified 1494 as the starting date for the trans-
fer of Renaissance culture from Italy to northern Europe. He reveals the wider
influence of Tuscan humanism from as early as the second decade of the fifteenth
century. With the example of Poggio Bracciolini, and texts by Giannozzo Manetti
and Matteo Palmieri, Maxson argues that by the end of the 1410s, a shared cul-
tural language existed across Europe, a language that shaped, and was shaped
by, Florentines. While other writers from other places also participated in this
exchange, humanists from the Tuscan city were unusual in that the political and
cultural reaches of other cities meshed. For most of the fifteenth century, however,
Florence’s culture spread to places far from the reach of its diplomats or armies.
The city’s reputation for cultural innovation and excellence had solidified in
the European imagination by 1600, even as, paradoxically, Florence’s real cultural
influence was in decline; as the final chapter in the book reveals. Using the case
study of Giovan Battista Andreini, Sarah Gwyneth Ross shows that in seventeenth-
century Europe the projection of a Florentine identity proved a significant asset
for the career of the actor and author. Andreini had multiple options for his civic
identity, with ties to other important cities in northern Italy as well as connections
to powerful European capitals. However, he chose to present himself as Florentine to his
audiences. Ross demonstrates the creation, maintenance, and function of Andreini’s
Florentine identity. Moreover she shows that by the mid-1600s, Andreini joined
other performers and writers in attempting to project sophistication and refine-
ment by projecting Florentine citizenship, regardless of the specifics underlying
such a claim. Florence had become a key touchstone for cultural excellence in
seventeenth-century Europe.
No book can cover all topics, and this book too omits some notable elements
of Florence’s global connections, some of which have enjoyed recent scholarly
interest. For instance, the process of artistic exchange between the Tuscan city
and the Low Countries, facilitated by the commercial links between the two
regions, is absent; as is any consideration of the complex political and economic
ties between Florence and the Hungarian court in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. Likewise, any consideration of the commercial network that connected
Florence across Europe and into the Levant prior to the late sixteenth century
makes no appearance. Merchants from the Tuscan city began expanding into ter-
ritories beyond the immediate region in the thirteenth century, reaching its fullest
extent and greatest dynamism after the mid-fourteenth century. Mehmed II granted
Florentine traders an ahidnâme sometime soon after the conquest of Constantinople.
These are not, in themselves, under-researched aspects of the Florentine experi-
ence. They are, however, elements of the city’s history that would benefit from
renewed consideration, and might look different, considered as part of the story of
its global and transnational connections and exchanges.
A global Florence leads to new insights into the conception and continuation
of the Renaissance itself as a category of historical analysis. The provincializa-
tion of grand themes of modernity, rationality, and progress, and of narratives
that position Europe’s past as the metric for achievement, does not equate to the
abandonment of previous scholarship of either the city or the concept. Instead it
highlights the centrality of connections and exchanges that extended far beyond
the Italian peninsula to the flourishing of the city between the thirteenth and
seventeenth centuries. A commercial network that linked Florence into an ever-
widening economy brought both material goods in abundance and wealth to the
city. Whatever other elements fueled its development, the money provided by
transcontinental, cross-cultural trade sustained the cultural efflorescence of the
Florentine Renaissance. The wealth of the city and its economic importance
equally lent it political significance from the early decades of the fifteenth century,
within the affairs of Italy and so within a network of influence and interest that
extended across Europe. Both the commercial network and the political signifi-
cance of Florence declined from the second decade of the seventeenth century. The
city’s cultural significance, however, continued unabated. Its reputation for literary
and artistic brilliance, which was not only paid for by the commercial network but
also benefitted directly from connections with a wider world, remained undimin-
ished. The Florentine Renaissance was a product of engagement with Europe’s
classical past and the particular geo-political realities of the Italian peninsula. But it
was also a product of engagement and connections with the wider world beyond
Italy and beyond Europe. The resulting cultural and intellectual movement was,
subsequently, a significant element in the Europeanization of Europe.
Notes
1 See now Lia Markey, Imagining the Americas in Medici Florence (University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016), 138–57, who situates the image within a
broader context of Medici fascination with the New World; on which see also Brian
Brege, “Renaissance Florentines in the Tropics: Brazil, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany,
and the Limits of Empire,” in The New World in Early Modern Italy, ed. Elizabeth
Horodowich and Lia Markey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). On
Ligozzi in Florence see most recently Elena Fumagalli, “Jacopo Ligozzi al servizio dei
Medici: Le trasformazioni del ruolo di pittore di corte,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen
Institutes in Florenz 57, no. 2 (2015).
2 Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K.
Gray,William Brockman, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan
Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman
Aiden, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books,” Science
331 (2011; Published online ahead of print: 12/16/2010). To reproduce the results see
https://books.google.com/ngrams, searching for the terms in books published in English
between 1900 and 2000, with a smoothing factor of three. A smoothing factor of zero
naturally reveals a more dynamic picture, but the overall trajectory remains the same.
3 On mercantile and economic exchanges between Florence and the wider European
world in the late middle ages, see for example, Edwin S. Hunt, The Medieval Super-
Companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994); and William Caferro, John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-
Century Italy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). On the appeal of
Florentine humanism see for example,Vincenzo Fera, “Agostino Sottili e Petrarca,” Studi
medievali e umanistici 13 (2015); and Alexander Lee, Humanism and Empire: The Imperial
Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
4 See for example, Riccardo Fubini, Italia Quattrocentesca: Politica e diplomazia nell’età
di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994); Serente Ferente, Gli ultimi guelfi:
Linguaggi e identità politiche in Italia nella seconda metà del Quattrocento (Rome:Viella, 2013);
Stefano U. Baldassarri and Brian Jeffrey Maxson, “Giannozzo Manetti, the Emperor, and
the Praise of a King in 1452,” Archivio Storico Italiano 172, no. 3 (2014); Oren J. Margolis
and Brian J. Maxson, “The ‘Schemes’ of Piero de’ Pazzi and the Conflict with the Medici
(1461–62),” Journal of Medieval History 41, no. 4 (2015).
5 For example, see the many publications of Katalin Prajda on Florentines in Hungary, such
as Katalin Prajda, “Representations of the Florentine Republic at the Royal Court in the
Kingdom of Hungary,” in The Routledge History of the Renaissance, ed. William Caferro
(London: Routledge, 2017); eadem, “Justice in the Florentine Trading Community of
Late Medieval Buda,” Mélanges de l’École francaise de Rome. Moyen-Age 127, no. 2 (2015);
eadem, Network and Migration in Early Renaissance Florence, 1378–1433 (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2018). Another interesting line of inquiry has looked at
Florentines and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. See, for example, Giuseppe Gianluca
Cicco, “Benedetto Accolti e la diplomazia fiorentina all’indomani della conquista turca
di Constantinopoli,” Schola Salernitana 10, no. 251–67 (2005).
6 Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of
Geography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).
7 Rita Costa-Gomes, ed. A Portuguese Abbot in Renaissance Florence: The Letter Collection of
Gomes Eanes (1415–1463) (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2017).
8 For a recent and succinct introduction to the scholarship, dating back to the 1970s
and earlier, and the state of the question see Margherita Azzari and Leonardo Rombai
eds., Amerigo Vespucci e i mercanti viaggiatori fiorentini del Cinquecento (Florence: Firenze
University Press, 2013).
9 Stefano Dall’Aglio, L’assassino del duca: Esilio e morte di Lorenzino de’ Medici (Florence:
Olschki, 2011); Carlos Plaza, Españoles en la corte de los Medici: Arquitectura y política en tiem-
pos de Cosimo I (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2016). Dall’Aglio is now
also available in English translation: Stefano Dall’Aglio, The Duke’s Assassin: Exile and
Death of Lorenzino de’ Medici, trans. Donald Weinstein (New Haven, CT:Yale University
Press, 2015).
10 Maurizio Arfaioli and Marta Caroscio, eds., The Grand Ducal Medici and the Levant:
Material Culture, Diplomacy, and Imagery in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Turnhout/
London: Brepols/Harvey Miller, 2016); Markey, Imagining the Americas; Corey Tazzara,
The Free Port of Livorno and the Transformation of the Mediterranean World (Oxford: Oxford
11 Sean Roberts, “A Global Florence and Its Blind Spots,” in The Globalization of
Renaissance Art, ed. Daniel Savoy (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2017). An earlier version
of Roberts’ chapter was presented as part of the conference panels on which this volume is
based.
12 The historiography of Venice’s Mediterranean empire and its status as a point of contact
between western and eastern Europe is large and growing. On the stato da mar, see for
example, Maria Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean:The
Decline of Venice and the Rise of England, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2017); Molly Greene, A Shared World: Christians and Muslims in the Early Modern
Mediterranean (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Erin Maglaque, Venice’s
Intimate Empire: Family Life and Scholarship in the Renaissance Mediterranean (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2018); Monique O’Connell, Men of Empire: Power and
Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2009); Evgeny A. Khvalkov, “Due atti notarili rogati a Tana, colonia veneziana sul
mare di Azou, e alcune considerazioni sull’età dei Veneziani che hanno visitato Tana,”
Studi Veneziani 74 (2016). On cross-cultural and political exchanges within Venice and
between Venice and the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, see for example, Blake de
Maria, Becoming Venetian: Immigrants and the Arts in Early Modern Venice (New Haven, CT
& London: Yale University Press, 2010); Eric R. Dursteler, Venetians in Constantinople:
Nation, Identity, and Coexistence in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2006); Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The Impact
of the Islamic World on Venetian Architecture, 1100–1500 (New Haven, CT & London:
Yale Univeristy Press, 2000); Michael J. Levin, Agents of Empire: Spanish Ambassadors in
Sixteenth-Century Italy (Ithaca, NY & London: Cornell University Press, 2005), esp.
pp. 13–42; E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects between Venice
and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY & London: Cornell University Press, 2012).
13 On the connections and exchanges between sixteenth-century Rome and the Spanish
monarchy, see for example, Piers Baker-Bates and Miles Pattenden, eds., The Spanish
Presence in Sixteenth-Century Italy: Images of Iberia (Farnham & Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2015), cc. 4–6, 9; Thomas James Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 1500–1700 (New Haven, CT
& London:Yale University Press, 2001); Levin, Agents of Empire; Pablo González Tornel,
“Forging an Image for the Spanish Monarchy in Seventeenth-Century Rome: Habsburg
Religiosity and Visual Propaganda,” Hispanic Research Journal 19 (2018). On papal Rome
as a significant center for images and understandings of Asia, see for example, Camilla
Russell, “Imagining the ‘Indies’: Italian Jesuit Petitions for the Overseas Missions at the
Turn of the Seventeenth Century,” in L’Europa divisa e i nuovi mondi. Per Adriano Prosperi,
ed. Massimo Donattini, Giuseppe Marcocci, and Stefania Pastore (Pisa: Edizioni della
normale, 2011).
14 On Naples and the Spanish monarchy, see for example, Baker-Bates and Pattenden,
The Spanish Presence, cc. 3, 8, 10; John A. Marino, Becoming Neapolitan: Citizen Culture in
Baroque Naples (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011);Víctor Mínguez
et al., eds., La fiesta barroca: Los reinos de Nápoles y Sicilia (1535–1713), vol. 3 (Universitat
Jaume I: Biblioteca centrale della Regione siciliana <<Alberto Bombace>>, 2014). On
Milan, see Stefano D’Amico, Spanish Milan: A City within the Empire, 1535–1706 (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). More broadly, on the Spanish monarchy’s interests
on the Italian peninsula during the sixteenth century, see Manuel Rivero Rodríguez,
Felipe II y el Gobierno de Italia (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los
Centenarios de Felipe II y Carlos V, 1998). On Genoa’s long history of interaction with
non-Italian actors, see for example Steven A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528
(Chapel Hill, NC & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1996);Thomas Allison
Kirk, Genoa and the Sea: Policy and Power in an Early Modern Maritime Republic, 1559–1684
(Baltimore, MD & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Oren J. Margolis,
“Cipriano de’ Mari’s Lucianic Speech for René of Anjou (St-Dié, MS 37): Humanism
and Diplomacy in Genoa and Beyond,” Renaissance Studies 27, no. 2 (2011).
15 In addition to scholarly caution, significant practical and technical challenges—such as
linguistic and paleographic skills in non-European languages—also exist. These need to
be overcome if global perspectives on European history are to move beyond synthesis to
archival research.
16 For a good synthesis and programmatic consideration of the effects of this process of
de-centering for historians of Europe in the twenty-first century, see Laurence Cole and
Philipp Ther, “Introduction: Current Challenges of Writing European History,” European
History Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2010); Natalie Zemon Davis, “Decentering History: Local
Stories and Cultural Crossings in a Global World,” History and Theory 50, no. 2 (2011).
17 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, ed.
Sherry B. Ortner, Nicholas B. Dirks, and Geoff Eley (Princeton, NJ & Oxford: Princeton
18 Patricia Clavin, “Time, Manner, Place: Writing Modern European History in
Global, Transnational, and International Contexts,” European History Quarterly 40,
no. 4 (2010); David Abulafia, “Mediterranean History as Global History,” History and
Theory 50, no. 2 (2011).
19 Peter Burke, “How to Write a History of Europe: Europe, Europes, Eurasia,”
European Review 14, no. 2 (2006); Cole and Ther, “Introduction”; Michael Mitterauer,
“Exceptionalism? European History in a Global Context,” European Review 14, no. 2 (2006).
20 For an example of such a perspective see Anne Dunlop, “European Art and the Mongol
Middle Ages:Two Exercises in Cultural Translation,” trans Le-le Li and Jian Wu, 美育学刊
[Journal of Aesthetic Education, Hangzhou Normal University] 6 (2015). A version in English
is available at www.academia.edu/19962820/European_Art_and_the_Mongol_Middle_
Ages_English_text_of_Meiyu_Xuekan_article_ (accessed 29 November 2018).
21 Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change,
950–1350 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 269–91.
22 See Burke, “How to Write a History of Europe”; idem, “Did Europe Exist Before 1700?”
History of European Ideas 1, no. 1 (1980).
23 For a contrary view, that no common European culture or civilization exists, see Felipe
Fernández-Armesto, “A European Civilization: Is There Any Such Thing?” European
Review 10, no. 1 (2002).
24 For an excellent analysis of the Florentine commercial network see Richard A.

Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
25 For good recent assessments of the economy of Renaissance Italy, see Judith C. Brown,
“Economies,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance, ed. Michael Wyatt
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Stephan R. Epstein, “L’economia itali-
ana nel quadro europeo,” in Commercio e cultura mercantile, ed. Franco Franceschi, Richard
A. Goldthwaite, and Reinhold C. Mueller (Treviso: Fondazione Cassamarca/Angelo
Colla Editore, 2007).
26 The most comprehensive recent synthesis of Florentine political history for the
Renaissance period in English is John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575
(Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006).
27 For an excellent recent synthesis on Florentine art, see Loren Partridge, Art of Renaissance
Florence, 1400–1600 (Berkeley, CA & London: University of California Press, 2009).
No single synthetic account of Florentine humanism exists—analogous to the works
by Goldthwaite, Najmey, and Partridge on the economy, politics, and visual culture of
the city, respectively. On the distinct cultural and social contexts of Florentine human-
ism, see, most recently, Brian Jeffrey Maxson, The Humanist World of Renaissance Florence
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Ronald G. Witt, In the Footsteps of the
Ancients:The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni (Leiden & Boston, MA: Brill, 2000)
provides an excellent analysis of the development of humanism, which contextualizes
the cultural ascendancy of Florentine humanism from the late fourteenth century.
28 The connections between Renaissance humanism and the religious reformations of the
sixteenth century are well known. For recent examples of scholarship that has highlighted
the enduring, sometimes unexpected and unintended consequences of Renaissance cul-
ture, see Thomas James Dandelet, The Renaissance of Empire in Early Modern Europe (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance
(Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press, 2014); eadem, “Humanist Lives
of Classical Philosophers and the Idea of Renaissance Secularization: Virtue, Rhetoric,
and the Orthodox Sources of Unbelief,” Renaissance Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2017).
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PART I
Economic perspectives
2
TAKING ARCHITECTURAL THEORY
ON THE ROAD
The sliding scales of the Florentine traveler
Niall Atkinson
Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) declared that one
of the greatest pleasures . . . and one worthy of a free man, is to wander

through cities and regions: to gaze upon temples, theaters, fortifications and
all sorts of buildings, to walk in places which, by nature and by human labor
and design, have been made beautiful, welcoming, and secure.1
Although Alberti was contrasting this pleasure to the misery of scholarship, his own
writing demonstrates how closely he studied the physical setting, layout, and senso-
rial effects that cities had on the roaming viewer, on the body that approached them
as much as the one that inhabited them. Such a practice, in part, would lead to the
design principles laid out in his De re aedificatoria, where the author explored the
“whole matter of building.” But it is Alberti’s notion of a free individual, for whom
walking in the city led to a careful analysis of its parts, that I first want to follow. By
Alberti’s time, Florentines had developed a vigorous tradition of visually describing
their social and physical world. I believe that Alberti’s writings about buildings and
cities were responding directly to this local tradition, elevating it to an aesthetics of
urban experience that gave rise to a set of fixed design principles. As much as Alberti
learned from the ancients, such as Vitruvius, he also had his wandering gaze attuned
to the world around him, to which he was highly sensitive, and from which he cre-
ated a language to talk about space and society.
Therefore, it is this Florentine practice of walking, looking, measuring, count-
ing, and describing that is the subject of this investigation. It was a flexible apparatus
of conceiving the city at various interlocking scales, which were as much archi-
tectural and geographic as they were social and political. Taking account of one’s
city was always connected to the ways in which one related, physically and psy-
chologically, to the state and its urban authority. Florentine guildsmen—artisans,
22 Niall Atkinson
professionals, or merchants—were deeply engaged in how their city ought to look

and function as an ideal social order and spatial context. As a result, such descrip-
tive practices reveal a great deal about how Florentines understood the symbolic
dimensions of the built environment, how they placed themselves within it, and
how they related to others, not only at home but also abroad, in places where the
links between a city’s design and its social order were not so familiar.
It is a central claim of this essay that early modern Florentine travelers brought
along these descriptive tools as a way to structure their relationship to foreign
cultures. They used such tools to quantify unknown places—measuring space, sur-
veying buildings and people, and mapping routes and streets to order them within
an expanding patchwork of mental geographies. This is not to say that describing
cities as social and architectural phenomena was an exclusively Florentine practice,
but that it took on a particular intensity as a corollary to the way they confronted
the history, economy, beauty, and monumentality of their own city.
Ragionare: taking account of the city

From things seen to things described, Florentine merchants developed a variety
of ways of turning the city they saw into a quantifiable entity. The interpreter of
the cityscape was both participant and voyeur, caught within daily struggles and
conflicts, who wrote from a particular point of view. Florentines developed highly
complex ways of reading their urban environment, cataloging what they saw,
heard, and imagined. This dynamic conception of the interrelation between social
practices and urban space reveals how architecture was caught within structures of
power, desire, and the interests of those who brought it into being, attempted to
govern it, and who in various ways inhabited it.
Historian Christian Bec has shown how medieval Italian merchants expressed
their notions of time and space in almost everything they wrote. Beyond account
books and diaries, even their creative writing was founded upon a certain quantifi-
cation and precision of time and space through trivialities and details that generated
a realistic effect.2 Measuring space allowed the merchant to express his surprise
in the face of extraordinary spectacles and instilled a poetic dimension into his
calculations beyond purely mathematical value.3 Numbers provided the terms of
reference for understanding complex spaces, objects, and situations. Such confi-
dence in the power of numbers gleaned from one’s direct perception was seen as
a bulwark against the competing narratives of rivals. As Bec points out, in such
practices space was not simply a container but was defined by the possibilities of
moving through it, a function of gestures imbued with temporal meaning.4
According to Bec, measuring was not so much a practice of mechanical precision
as it was a product of the visual experience of the observer. The merchant viewer was
trained in applied mathematical processes and was, therefore, able to approximate
spatial measurements by estimating and reordering three-dimensional perspectival
distortions.5 Although expressed as numbers, proportions were experienced physi-
cally, rather than rationally, defining qualitative rather than quantitative value.6
Taking architectural theory on the road 23
Descriptions were built upon comparisons with known places and monuments and
then set in relation to the viewer’s position in space and time. Bec defines these
practices under the term ragionare, a way of accounting for, taking account of, and
settling accounts with the city.7 It provided a way to contain—through counting,
measuring, and estimating differences—the anxiety produced by the often extraor-
dinary, sometimes violent, but always dynamic, events that constituted urban life.8
There was, therefore, an economic value associated with moving from one place
to another, expressed implicitly in a list compiled by the merchant Saminiato de’
Ricci that recorded the distances between trading cities measured as the number of
days it took a banker’s bill of exchange to reach its destination and be transformed
back into liquid currency.9 Such economic calculations shared the mental space of
personal salvation, in which a merchant would keep track of religious sites visited
and benefices received.10 Counting altars, churches, or religious institutions was
not simply an expression of the amount of that city’s wealth and its piety, but also
the merchant’s numerical, and therefore bodily, proximity to holy places. Such
proximity was part of a larger spatial network that guaranteed salvation as an effect
of wandering along streets.11
The most iconic example of this kind of urban ragionare can be found in Giovanni
Villani’s (c. 1280–1348) famous descriptions of Florence. In both passages the mer-
chant chronicler transforms his city into an amalgam of numbers and measurements
as well as a profusion of people, institutions, and things—things produced and
things consumed—rendering Florence as simultaneously a fixed physical entity
and a dynamic system of relations.12 Both descriptions provided powerful models
for generations of Florentines who looked to Villani for the prehistory of their
own times. Villani’s chronicle was widely read and copied, providing a model for
knowing the city and singing its praises.
In 1324, Villani breaks from his narrative account of the city’s history and
takes the reader on a virtual tour around the city’s massively expanded walls
(Figure 2.1). He systematically gives the measurements of each tower, gate,
and wall section.13 The journey starts in the east, on the north bank of the river,
with a sixty braccia (35 m) tower built on the foundations of Ponte Rubiconte,
the current Ponte alle Grazie (1). The first gate, the Porta Reale or Porta San
Francesco, was ninety braccia (52.5 m) north of this tower and its tower was also
sixty braccia high (2). In the middle of the next 442 braccia (258 m), midway to the
Porta Guelfa—sixty braccia high, twenty-two braccia (13 m) wide—was another
tower (3).14 Within the next 384 braccia (224 m), running to the Porta alla Croce,
or Sant’Ambrogio, which led into the Casentino, was another tower (4). Three
towers then punctuated the 630 braccia (367 m) distance to the great five-sided
tower, Guardia del Massaio (5). Here, the wall turned toward the west.15 The
reader is taken past gates named Fiesolana, Pinti, Servi, and San Gallo, which,
Villani informs us, lead to Bologna, Lombardy, Prato, Pistoia, and Lucca. In this
way the city—its limits and thresholds—is situated within a larger network of
urban centers, regions, and spatio-economic relationships. The text evokes a very
clear visual image of where the reader is going, following Villani around every
24 Niall Atkinson
corner in this fashion until he hits the river Arno (7). He pauses here to take
stock of the overall picture: a combined wall length of 7,700 braccia (4,489 m),
not including the 500 braccia (291.5 m) across the river bank; nine double gates,
four main and five minor; forty-five towers. The distance traveled along the river
measured 4,500 braccia (2,623.5 m). The distance across to the Oltrarno walls is
350 braccia (204 m).
After walking back to the Ponte all Carraia, he crosses the river and continues his
description at the Porta da Verzaia or San Friano (San Frediano), which led to Pisa
(8).16 In total, there are five miles of walls, three braccia (1.75 m) thick, and twenty
braccia (11.7 m) high with graceful crenellations.17 Such details heighten the expe-
riential realism of what is essentially a travel account in miniature. Villani moves
coherently, marking each gate and tower as part of an itinerary of a larger network
of civic shrines and sacred measurements, until he returns to where he started.
Together, these numbers contained a whole series of symbolic and sacred forces
associated with ritual entries, diplomatic meetings, exorcisms, gift exchanges, and
civic processions. Walls and gates defined the limits and thresholds of the city,
FIGURE 2.1 ap of Florence showing the fourteenth-century wall circuit and

M
Villani’s ideal axes. Numbers indicate points at which Villani measures
the walls and towers as outlined in the text. Squares indicate the four
churches Villani mentions that sit on his ideal axes.
Source: Drawing by author.
the division between within and without.18 Having laid out the circuit of walls,
Villani then enters the city, proceeding to measure and name its principal axes
(2,200–2,800 braccia), which contained four churches centered around an ideal
central urban geometry—its ancient forum and medieval market. Therefore, the
city’s pagan and Christian topography was overlaid onto the commercial hub of
the city (Figure 2.1).19 These two movements, around and through the city, linked the
symbolic thresholds and networks that constituted the physical experience of
the city. The internal axes were the armature supporting the network of trade and
movement, linking daily movements to the sanctity of a local pilgrimage. It con-
nected merchant numbers and accounting practices to the sacred measurements
that pilgrims would take from the Holy Land.20
Villani’s next description of Florence appears in the year 1338. It is structured
around the city’s annual revenues and expenditures, a scaled-up version of the
merchant’s personal accounting techniques. This general account produced an
index of the health and well-being of the populace and a record for future gen-
erations to compare the relative ebbs and flows of the city’s fortune, power, and
population (Table 2.1).21
What at first seems like a sprawling profusion of random quantities is actu-
ally a carefully curated series that reveals the socio-spatial organization of the
city. Villani estimates a total of about 90,000 bocche—literally mouths to feed—
of men, women, and children (excluding religious), who were supported by
the coordinated provision of bread. This breaks down into 6,000 baptisms,
8,000 to 10,000 children learning to read, 1,000–1,200 boys learning account-
ing techniques, and 600 students learning grammar and logic.22 Villani then
transitions from the city as “machine for learning” to its production of pious and
TABLE 2.1 1338: Villani’s Florence: a machine for living
25,000 men bearing arms 70–80,000 bolts of cloth valued at 1,200,000 florins
1,500 nobles paying surety 80 exchange banks
65 fully equipped knights 350,000 florins minted
90,000 mouths 20,000 denari da quattro
146 ovens 300 workshops dedicated to footwear
140 bushels of grain/day 100 jurists
6,000 baptisms 600 notaries
10,000 children learning to read 60 physicians
1,200 boys learning basic accounting 100 apothecaries
600 students learning grammar and logic Innumerable merchants
110 churches 55,000 vats of wine
57 parishes 4,000 cattle
5 abbeys, 80 monks 60,000 sheep
24 convents, 500 nuns 20,000 goats
10 mendicant orders, 700 friars 30,000 pigs
30 hospitals, 1,000 beds 400 loads of melons/day
200 workshops
26 Niall Atkinson
charitable credit. A total of 110 churches occupy fifty-seven parishes. There are
five abbeys with eighty monks, twenty-four convents with 500 nuns, ten men-
dicant orders with 700 friars, and thirty hospitals with more than 1,000 beds,
and as many as 300 priests.23 Moving from religion to commerce, Villani records
200 workshops, 70–80,000 pieces of cloth valued at more than 1.2 million gold
florins, in an industry that supports 30,000 people.24 Twenty warehouses store
10,000 pieces of silk worth 30,000 florins imported from abroad and all sold
locally. Eighty exchange banks handled 350,000 gold florins and 20,000 lire
of denari with a total of 350,000 florins minted. There follow the numbers of
shoemakers, judges, notaries, physicians, surgeons, and spice merchants.25 This
brings him to the city’s mercantile community, whose continual arrival and
departure overwhelms even his powers of ragionare.26
From this relentless pace of production—of citizens, piety, wealth, artisans,
and professionals—Villani turns to the massive consumption it supports: the vast
amounts of wine, livestock, and produce entering the city. He lists foreign offi-
cials, local magistrates, religious leaders, and other magnificent things that should
be recorded: the continuous building of houses and palaces, churches and cathe-
dral, all manner of monasteries and convents. As alimentary abundance enters the
city, architectural grandeur spills out into the countryside.27 It is at this point that
Villani’s faith in the natural virtue of abundance falters. He condemns the private
follies of country villas and city palaces as the pursuits of sinning, ostentatious
madmen.28 However, he acknowledges that although the costs were excessive this
constructed landscape was a magnificent thing for a foreigner to see. It would
compare favorably to that of Rome in the eyes of visitors who would marvel at its
scale, magnificence, and density.29
Despite Villani’s hyperbole, he knew that a foreign viewer would compare
Florence to other cities and make moral judgments about the city’s inhabitants
based on the measure and scale of its architectural physiognomy. As Villani’s
description shows, this way of approaching the city—inside out for the local, out-
side in for the foreigner—was a systematic method of apprehending a dynamic
phenomenon, a social mechanism with multiple moving, interrelated parts meant
to be viewed on the move. Alberti would dramatize and formalize such methodical
movement when he returned to his native city from exile in 1427. In the dedica-
tion of his treatise On Painting, he describes how he entered the city and realized
from its exceptional beauty that the wonders of antiquity had been surpassed by his
contemporaries. The journey culminates in the center of the city, where he mar-
vels at the scale of Brunelleschi’s dome that reaches back out from the center of the
city to cover all Tuscans with its shadow. This movement from periphery to center
was exploited by Alberti to apprehend the city’s moral and aesthetic authority as a
succession of views of urban spaces for which he would also give instructions on
how to measure correctly.30 As Anthony Grafton points out, the fifteenth century
was the inheritor of the massive transformations and expansions carried out by
thriving cities such as Florence in the fourteenth century. Such projects, often
incomplete, stimulated discussions about urban design taken up by Alberti and his
contemporaries.31 Villani was caught right in the middle of such transformations

and he was already imagining future visitors like Alberti, who read the past and
pondered the future by reading the condition of the city’s infrastructure.
Benedetto Dei’s lists: counting and measuring

Villani’s model would motivate other Florentine diarists, chroniclers, and mer-
chants to build on his techniques of description, his lists, figures, calculations, and
judgments. For example, the Florentine diplomat, Benedetto Dei (1418–1492),
juxtaposed Villani’s statistical description of Florence with his own in 1472, per-
forming the very comparison that Villani had imagined.32 Dei would also count
and measure, setting these descriptions next to accounts of his extensive travels. He
dismantled Villani’s spatial and social portraits of Florence into a series of highly
focused and personal topographies.
In his snapshot of the city he begins the first of many monotonous, hypnotic, but
strangely compelling repetitions.33 The repeated title, in red ink, recalls the rubric
headings of Florentine statutes. Florentie bella, 1,545 years of liberty, five miles around
with eighty towers in its walls. Florentie bella, 406 towns that open and close each day
under its authority. Florentie bella, 360,000 florins collected in taxes for wars, but also
for dowries. Florentie bella, 3,600 palaces outside the city, 108 churches that mark the
holy offices of the church, twenty-three government palaces and twenty-one guilds.
Florentie bella, fifty piazzas within the city, all surrounded by palaces and churches,
merchants, and workshops, where Florentines jousted, danced, and played games.
Dei’s method is to count the squares, name them, arrange buildings around them and
then enliven them with the activities performed in them. From here, “Florentie bella”
offers twenty great things to show the foreigner. The list includes the campanile, the
dome, the public palace, paved streets, the Annunziata, a hospital, two great mendi-
cant churches, San Lorenzo, the convent of Le Murate, the Pazzi chapel, the tombs
of the Medici and the Rucellai; an itinerary that is remarkably similar to today’s tour-
ist agenda. Dei continues to reformulate these lists on an ever-expanding matrix of
themes. He records the great public and private building works bringing honor and
glory to the city: Brunelleschi’s dome, palaces, churches, and convents, then affluent
citizens, ambassadors, famous Florentines, and political exiles.34
Amid this profusion of people and goods, spaces, exchanges, institutions, tav-
erns, trades, gardens, and festivals, Dei zooms in to the streets and squares of his
own neighborhood of Santo Spirito. He puts names, households, bridges, streets,
and squares into spatial relationships by the rhythmic repetition of una via.
Una via, from the Gate of San Frediano to the gate of San Niccolò, full
of gentlemen. Una via, from the Ponte Vecchio to the gate of San Piero
Gattolino, the Porta Romana. Una via, from the Ponte Santa Trinita to the
column in via Maggio. Una via, from Ponte alla Carraia to the Porte delle
Fornaci, the Porta Romana. Una via, from the Ponte Vecchio to the gate of
San Giorgio, which goes to Arcetri.35
28 Niall Atkinson
And so on, until he had measured the entire street network of the Oltrarno, defin-
ing them by wells, hospitals, or the families that dominated them (see Figure 2.2).
Dei closely follows the spirit of Villani’s description but at the neighborhood
level. He gives the main east–west and north–south axes, then the routes from
bridges through the neighborhood, and gives the briefest, but illuminating, infor-
mation about each street. The rhythm of the language, the repetition of terms,
helps to order and build a striking image of the topography. The reader expe-
riences a crisscrossing itinerary through the network of neighborhood streets,
traversing 33,000 braccia, (19 km) that Dei connects to each of the adjacent piazzas
and churches, intimating what activities took place there.36 “Una piazza, called
Santo Spirito, where the wool is stretched in the quarter and where ball games are
played. Una piazza, of San Felice, where the Ridolfi, Capponi, and Lippi reside.”37
And there are churches: “Una chiesa, of Santo Spirito, the principal church and
biggest of the quarter . . . Una chiesa, of Santa Maria del Carmine, where the hours
of the church are celebrated both day, and night.”38
“Una piazza . . . una chiesa . . . una chiesa e munistero . . . uno ispedale . . ..”39 At
first, these accumulative lists appear as abstractions. On closer inspection, however,
FIGURE 2.2 S ample succession of Benedetto Dei’s descriptions of the streets in his
neighborhood.
Source: Drawing by author.
the details point to more intimate connections. In Santo Spirito, Dei marks streets
by physical landmarks but he also marks them with family names demonstrating
how he was intimately familiar with both the physical and social topography of his
neighborhood because some of those names bore more significance than others.
Some of the houses—Manetti, Capponi, Guicciardini, Soderini, Fantoni—show
up later in his text in lists of enemies and friends and some of those, such as the
Capponi, show up on both.40 This was also an intensely personal topography for
Dei, where certain places could evoke anxiety or offer refuge.
With such a systematic survey of neighborhood communication networks, Dei
traces urban mobility. He gives the distinct impression of having repeatedly tra-
versed these streets he already knew so well. He was taking account of the intimate
nature of public spaces, transforming them into the language of an account book.
Now the neighborhood had an enviable rationality into which he could insert the
people, institutions and daily activities that gave it meaning. His description moves
from measured space, through a social topography of the neighborhood, to the
social rituals of a larger civic narrative.
Dei, like Villani, was a methodical organizer of space and distance.41 He con-
structed a familiar itinerary through spaces that were heterogeneous by nature. Both
of these merchants documented the different ways of negotiating a city that was
an amalgam of interests, economies, spiritual practices, and leisure. Both expressed
the conviction that architecture, urban space, and the communities that inhabited
them determined the nature of a city’s identity. If this were true for Florence, it
must also be true for all cities, and such a method of quantifying experience—of
walls, streets, people, trade, politics, customs—was translatable, making social rela-
tions comparable. This is not to say that such techniques gave deeply nuanced
insight into the complexities of cultural difference. However, bringing a quan-
tifiable order to the diverse activities of the city, organizing them around a fixed
geometry, and allowing the expression of harmony and discord represented an
open-ended method that could be applied to any city. As Juan Pau Rubies points
out, early modern voyages by Europeans were “structured as a succession of cities”
because this was a way of grounding a cultural analysis in a particular aspect of
human civilization that was “independent of Christian theology.” As well, cities,
as the most fundamental and complex social and material configurations of human
design, easily led to cross-cultural comparisons. As a social environment and an
economic system, a city could be evaluated according to its size, the variety of its
buildings and the commodities it produced. “This interest seems natural enough in
a merchant,” Rubies observes, “but points towards a more general implicit prin-
ciple: that the capacity to produce a complex urban life, with all its economic and
political implications, is the main measure of social and cultural achievement.”42
Such a method did not deny, parody, or misrecognize difference. Instead, it
took the built environment as given, as an expression of a certain social ideal
and structured a basic anthropological interpretation around these fixed spaces.
In other words, a formal language of architectural description was developed that
began with the location, site, and prospect of the city, defined its walls, negotiated
30 Niall Atkinson
its streets, and described the actions of its inhabitants. Alberti would codify such
analyses into principles of good architectural design by reverse engineering this
process through which Florentines such as Villani and Dei integrated a city into a
landscape and an economy, by describing it as an object and as a series of itinerar-
ies connected to other cities. Alberti emphasizes this when he discusses the siting
of a city in the middle of a territory, which would allow the view to extend in
all directions and facilitate the efficient intake of provisions from the surrounding
cultivated fields.43 Walls should be built according to ancient standards, a double
system with ditches and easy access from inside.44 Subsequently, gates need to be
positioned at the thresholds where regional roads enter the city. The character
of such roads was based on what they led to, inside or outside the city. They
were either straight or meandering according to both practical uses and aesthetic
experience, the prestige of the city, or the nature of its government.45 But what is
important for our present purposes is that Alberti was incorporating the sequence
of scalar encounters that Florentines expressed as a way of explaining the socio-
spatial organization of their city.
These techniques were also portable and gave rise to a certain kind of writing
practiced by Florentines abroad. Next, I consider two examples, one before and
one after Alberti. By doing so, I will show that architecture, as a medium of urban
expression, offered a way to mediate cross-cultural encounters that had nothing
to do with religious antipathy or ethnic conflict but accepted urban diversity as a
social fact.46 According to Alberti’s logic, siting, walls, and streets expressed a great
deal about a city’s character. And this is precisely what Florentines had been doing
and would continue to do when they ventured out into the world.
Wandering toward Jerusalem

In 1384, six Florentines set out for the Holy Land. Three of them, Leonardo
Frescobaldi, Simone Sigoli, and Giorgio Gucci, wrote accounts of their voyage.47
The coincidence of these parallel narratives offers valuable insights into the ways
that Florentines positioned themselves in relation to foreign places and peo-
ples through measuring, surveying, and mapping. Clearly, they had internalized
Villani’s model, variously describing the siting of a city, walking around its walls,
exploring its streets, and then commenting on individual monuments and the city’s
human communities. Such logic would then be expressed in Alberti’s six principles
of good design: locality, area, compartition, walls, roof, and openings. Locality,
Alberti defined as all the land surrounding the prospective building site. Area was
part of the locality and was the plot of land defined and enclosed by walls, includ-
ing all those surfaces upon which our feet may tread. Compartition is the layout
or process of dividing up the site into all its constituent parts, which are joined
together like parts of the whole body. Walls, roofs, and openings, respectively,
were the elements that defined privacy, protection, and access at the level of the
individual’s experience of the larger spaces of the city.48 As such, this method par-
alleled travelers’ descriptions of foreign cities to the degree that they began with a
general impression and increasingly bore down to the individual elements of the
city to create a scaled sequence of internally defined territories. Alberti’s elements
were not only a rational trajectory from external environment to internal struc-
tures, however; they were also based on the way a body encountered architectural
environments, in motion, as the synchronized movements of a wandering body
and a wondering eye. This division of design logic could be applied to a whole city
or a single building. It established an external context and then telescoped in from
the macro to the micro scales of architecture, from the space of a nation to a
community to a single individual.
The three travelers set sail on September 4 from Venice to Alexandria because
they wanted to trace the route of the Israelites’ long march from captivity to
the Promised Land, from the Old to the New Testament (Figure 2.3).49 On
September 27, after undergoing the legal formalities of arrival, they ventured out
to see the city’s holy sites and modern attractions.50 Frescobaldi began his descrip-
tion by noting that the old city was where St. Mark lost his head, but the new
city was much more impressive. It was fortified by fine walls, towers, a moat, and
FIGURE 2.3 lexandria. Pietro del Massaio, from Ptolemy’s Geography, Paris BNF Lat.
A
4802, 1475–80.
Source: Image used with permission.
32 Niall Atkinson
populated by 60,000 Jews, Muslims, and Christians. He describes the multi-ethnic

forces that guarded the city, the local governor’s palace with its beautiful court-
yard, loggia, staircase, and great hall, filled with dignitaries and sumptuous carpets.
He estimates that this city was as big as Florence, and dealt mostly in spices,
sugar, and silk. He connects this economy to its geographic position, linking the
Mediterranean by canals leading to the Nile, which, he informs us, issued from
the Jordan river whose origins lay in the earthly paradise. The other part of the
Nile passed through India and crossed the Red Sea, which explains why so much
trade flowed from the south, on boats and camels, toward the great commercial
centers of Alexandria or Damascus.
Frescobaldi was fully aware that Alexandria and Damascus lay at the end of two
major trading routes arriving from Asia en route to the Mediterranean. Beyond
this, his geographic knowledge conflates these routes with the sacred geography of
medieval Christian imagination. Two sacred rivers, the Nile and the Jordan, bore
merchandise along a path that led from the Old Testament creation story to the
new land of Christian redemption, transforming economic movement into a sacred
journey through world history. This connection was perfectly in keeping with the
way Villani had sanctified the major axes of Florence by connecting them to both
trade and religion—markets and churches.
Sigoli recounted Alexandria’s setting, its customs, and its provisions. Its circum-
ference was four miles. It was much longer than it was wide and it had the most
beautiful and spacious streets. It was well stocked with produce from all over the
world—so many fruits whose sweetness he could not measure.51 There were 50,000
men at arms, among them Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Samaritans, which you
could easily identify by the white, yellow, blue, and red head scarves they wore. He
contrasts this with the near nudity of 3,000 men who wore nothing but a cloth, and
the women who, except for their eyes, were completely covered so that not even
their husbands could recognize them, listing the costs of the precious materials and
jewels that they wore. He admits that Alexandria had a great port but claims that it
would have been much more beautiful if it were in the hands of Christians.52
Gucci notes that Alexandria was extremely large in circumference, full of houses
and people engaged in never-ending commerce amid an abundance of all kinds of
foods. He also notes the displacement of the old city, about a mile from the new
city, where Christian holy sites were located but where Christians were forbidden to
tread since such knowledge of the area might have led to the recapture of the city.53
On October 5, the pilgrims sailed up the canal from Alexandria to the Nile,
passing through the delta that contained 200 cities as large as Prato, an “island” that
was 500 miles in circumference and was the most fertile in the world (Figure 2.4).54
Frescobaldi measured Cairo at 18 × 8 miles, with a port whose volume could not be
matched by Venice, Genoa, and Ancona combined (Figure 2.5). It contained more
people than all of Tuscany and each street contained the population of Florence.55
Although Frescobaldi states that Cairo and Babylonia (Coptic Cairo) made up the
royal city, Gucci surveyed each separately. He measures Cairo as 5 × 10 miles, while
Babylonia was 6 × 3 miles. Of its population of three million, there were upwards
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
discendendo in dolce curva fin sopra l’attico del portico, avrebbero
servito di guida al distendimento e raccoglimento delle vele.
Una corona di metallo dorato, dalla quale scendessero vele cerulee
ornate di auree stelle; padiglione degno dell’imponente cavea ove
tutto era splendore: «sic undique fulgor percussit» [407], sarebbe, non
v’ha dubbio, una brillante idea! Ma si sarebbe potuta attuare?... La
risposta la dovrebbe dare il calcolo, al quale nè io ho tempo di
consacrare, nè, credo, varrebbe la pena di consacrarvelo, restando
la cosa in ogni modo nel campo delle ipotesi.
L’operazione di tendere il velario si eseguiva sul terrazzo

soprapposto al portico, ed era affidata a’ soldati di marina.
Lampridio [408] scrive: «Sane quum illi saepe pugnanti, ut deo,
populus favisset, irrisum se credens, populum romanum a militibus
classariis qui vela ducebant in amphitheatro interimi praeceperat»; e
questi marinai furono certamente i Misenati, perchè essi avevano il
loro quartiere nella stessa regione dell’Anfiteatro. Nel Curiosum e nel
De Regionibus leggiamo: III Regio.... Castra Misenatium. Preziosa
indicazione topografica, la quale, mentre ci rende certi della
vicinanza del quartiere dei Misenati all’Anfiteatro, dà pur anche
valore alla scoperta di un frammento d’iscrizione, in cui si fa
menzione dei Castra Misenatium, rinvenuto dall’Henzen tra le
schede del Fea, nelle quali si attesta che il frammento fu scoperto
fuori della parte semicircolare delle terme di Tito [409], ossia poco
lungi dal nostro Anfiteatro.
La situazione del quartiere dei marinai della flotta di Ravenna (in
Trastevere, presso la naumachia di Augusto, al servizio della quale
erano destinati quei militi) rafforza l’argomento desunto dalla
vicinanza del quartiere dei Misenati all’Anfiteatro Flavio, e prova che
essi appunto erano i classarii destinati a tendere il velario.
Nel 1776, alle radici dell’Esquilino verso il Colosseo, si rinvenne un
raro anemoscopio di marmo, il quale fu trasportato al Museo
Vaticano, e tuttora si ammira sulla Loggia del Belvedere. Esso
consiste in un prisma dodecagonale, largo (da faccia a faccia) m.
0,555, e alto m. 0,30: gli spigoli, formati dalle facce laterali, sono
adorni di un risalto cilindrico di m. 0,03 di diametro; e sulla faccia
superiore (orizzontale), ai quattro punti cardinali, sono incisi in bella
paleografia le seguenti parole:
MERIDIES — SEPTENTRIO — ORIENS — OCCIDENS. (V. Fig. 3ª).
Fig. 3.ª
Nel centro v’è un foro circolare del diametro di m. 0,045: in esso fu

introdotta l’asta della banderuola, e tuttora si vede l’impiombatura
che la fissava. Dal residuo dell’asta che rimane incassato nel foro,
sappiamo che la grossezza di detta asta era di m. 0,025. (V. Fig. 4ª).
Sulle facce laterali vi sono incisi in caratteri molto spontanei, ed
anche belli, i nomi dei venti (in greco ed in latino) in questo modo:
ΖΕΦΙ
ΡΟΣ
FAVO
NIVS
(V. Fig. 5ª)
Questo raro istrumento trovato presso il Colosseo, appartenne alla

Mole dei Flavî?
Fig. 4.ª
Non sarebbe certo irragionevole opinare, che, sull’alto dell’Anfiteatro,

vi fosse stato un indice esatto dei venti per norma del comandante
dei Misenati; affinchè questi, conosciuta con certezza la direzione
del vento, potesse (qualora impetuoso) dar ordine o di tendere le
vele soltanto da quella parte in cui rimanevano a riparo, ovvero, se
già distese, ordinare di ritirare quelle che si trovavano nella direzione
del vento. La forma del velario richiedeva senza dubbio una
sorveglianza diligente: poichè la grande apertura centrale lasciava
libero adito ai venti; e questi, se si fossero introdotti sotto il velario ed
avessero invaso la parte che trovavasi di fronte, avrebbero fatto
sollevare violentemente le vele, le quali, agitandosi soverchiamente,
avrebbero recato non poca molestia agli spettatori e causato gravi
danni. Che il vento potesse danneggiare gli edificî destinati ai
pubblici spettacoli, si può ragionevolmente argomentare dalla stessa
loro struttura a cielo aperto: e che talora il vento l’abbia realmente
danneggiati, lo possiamo dedurre da Plauto, il quale nella sua
commedia «Curcullio» [410], fa narrare alla giovane Planesium, ciò
che a questa accadde allorquando, ancor fanciulletta, assistè agli
spettacoli dionisiaci, ove aveala condotta Archestrata sua nutrice.
Non appena questa avea adagiato la fanciulletta nel teatro, levossi
un vento tanto turbinoso, che pose a soqquadro l’intiero
edificio [411].
Fig 5.ª
La forma dell’anemoscopio rinvenuto presso il Colosseo è

adattissima per ottenere il fine sopra indicato. Occorreva infatti che il
comandante avesse sott’occhio e quasi direi, stando a tavolino, la
Rosa dei venti, e vedesse la direzione dei medesimi. Pertanto
sarebbe stato necessario che il prisma dodecagonale marmoreo
stasse sul terrazzo dell’Anfiteatro, nel senso del meridiano
astronomico locale, e sopra un piedistallo alto 90 centimetri circa:
vale a dire, collocato in modo, che, una persona in piedi, volendo,
avesse potuto vedere comodamente il piano superiore
dell’istrumento e leggere agevolmente i nomi dei venti incisi sulle
facce laterali [412]. E perchè, guardando la faccia superiore
dell’istrumento, si potesse vedere la precisa direzione del vento, io
congetturo che la banderuola fosse fissata ad un cannello metallico
lungo quanto l’asta; che il cannello fosse appoggiato liberamente
sulla punta dell’asta, ed in basso munito di un indice orizzontale, il
quale, secondando il movimento della banderuola, avrebbe mostrato
sul piano, la direzione del vento. La banderuola poi, avrebbe dovuto
superare l’altezza dell’attico dell’Anfiteatro, affinchè potesse esser
mossa liberamente da ogni vento; e la grossezza dell’asta è tale, da
potersi innalzare con ogni solidità fin oltre a due metri; altezza che,
aggiunta a quella del piedestallo e del prisma soprappostogli,
avrebbe permesso alla banderuola di superare l’attico di un metro e
mezzo almeno.
La cura di evitare la violenza molesta del vento e i danni dei quali
spesso è causa, non è cosa nuova presso gli antichi. Vitruvio
prescrive che nell’edificazione di una nuova città, s’abbia riguardo
alla direzione dei venti; e vuole, che, costruita la cinta, nel centro
dell’area da questa racchiusa, si descriva, sopra un levigato piano di
marmo (da lui chiamato «marmoreum amussium»), orizzontalmente
disposto (ovvero sul suolo stesso spianato a perfezione e livellato),
la Rosa dei venti; e ciò, a fin di stabilire la direzione delle vie e delle
piazze tra l’una e l’altra regione degli otto venti principali; e per
liberare da molestia i cittadini e da malanni la loro salute [413].
In conclusione: se in tutti gli antichi teatri ed anfiteatri era cosa
prudente prevenire i pericolosi effetti del vento, nell’Anfiteatro Flavio
era di necessità assoluta. Se quell’immenso velario, a tant’altezza, si
fosse lasciato senza sorveglianza e a discrezione dei venti, si
sarebbe facilmente potuto ivi verificare il fatto immaginato da Plauto:
«Exoritur ventus: turbo: spectacula ibi ruunt». Questa necessità
evidente, e la prudenza degli antichi, specialmente nelle cose
pubbliche, mi hanno indotto a congetturare che quell’anemoscopio
rinvenuto in prossimità del Colosseo, sia appartenuto alla Mole
Vespasianea per la sorveglianza del velario. E la mia congettura
trova appoggio nella bella paleografia delle quattro parole incise
sulla faccia superiore dell’anemoscopio; paleografia che, per la
forma e regolarità delle lettere, può convenire benissimo all’età dei
Flavî. Anche le lettere dei nomi dei venti, si potrebbero forse
riportare a quei tempi; perchè, quantunque siano state eseguite con
minor cura e con una paleografia che tende al corsivo, pur
nondimeno sono di buona forma. Chè se taluno volesse ritenere
quei caratteri per un’opera posteriore all’età dei Flavî, non credo che
potrebbe farli discendere più giù degli inizi del secolo terzo; ed in
questo caso si dovrebbe conchiudere, che i nomi dei venti furono
incisi ai tempi dei grandi restauri fatti da Eliogabalo e Severo
Alessandro nel nostro Anfiteatro.
*
**
Dopo d’aver contemplato così minutamente questa stupenda mole,

sorge spontaneo il desiderio di sapere chi ne fosse l’architetto. Vana
speranza: il nome di questo grande giace sepolto in un oblio
inesplicabile. Il silenzio dei classici e degli antichi scrittori reca
veramente maraviglia! Lo stesso Marziale, che tanti epigrammi
dedicò al Flavio Anfiteatro, non ne fa parola.
Chi mai fu quell’ingegno sublime che diresse questa grandiosa e
sontuosa opera? È questa la domanda che in tutti i tempi, e sempre
indarno, si è fatta costantemente dai dotti; questo l’oggetto perenne
di congetture, questioni e dispute infruttuose. Non possediamo
documento certo; e finchè questo non apparisca, l’architetto del
Colosseo ci sarà sempre ignoto. Nondimeno, per ragione di storia,
riporteremo qui le differenti opinioni, lasciando a ciascheduno la
piena libertà di accettare quella che crederà più verisimile.
Giuseppe Antonio Guattani [414] scrive: «Gli intendenti non lasciano
di censurare le parti di quest’edificio (del Colosseo), trovandovi profili
inesatti, modinature cangianti di altezza, di misure e distanze non
corrispondenti. Al Serlio piacquero sì poco tutte le cornici, che le
chiamò tedesche(!), deducendone che l’architetto fu sicuramente
un tedesco». In nota poi aggiunge: «Marziale, ne fa autore un certo
Rabirio, architetto della casa di Domiziano, perchè di tutta la fabbrica
vorrebbe darne l’onore a quell’Augusto, il di cui pane mangiava. Ma
è a tutti noto il dolce stomachevole di quel suo epigramma. Se ne fa
generalmente autore un certo Gaudenzio cristiano, in vigore di una
iscrizione (che trovasi) nel sotterraneo di S. Martina; oscura per
altro, e che poco persuade».
Dalle parole del Guattani rileviamo chiaramente che il preteso
architetto dell’Anfiteatro o fu un tedesco, o fu Rabirio, o, finalmente,
un cristiano di nome Gaudenzio.
La prima opinione è del Serlio. Che Vespasiano si fosse servito di un
tedesco, non sarebbe cosa da recar maraviglia. Le province
Germaniche erano già soggette all’Impero, ed uno schiavo di quelle
regioni, reso libero, potè benissimo servire l’Imperatore in qualità di
architetto. L’opera di artisti liberti prestata ai reggitori dell’Impero non
è una novità per gli archeologi. Ma dedurre assolutamente la
nazionalità dell’architetto dalle modinature è un po’ troppo! Molto più
che la fretta con cui furono eseguiti i lavori dell’Anfiteatro, tradì il
pensiero dell’architetto. Forse un anacronismo trasse il Serlio a
quella conclusione, credendo di vedervi rispecchiate le goffe cornici
gotiche degli edifici settentrionali dell’epoca, come si suol dire,
antico-moderna.
La seconda opinione ne fa architetto Rabirio. I sostenitori di questa
s’appoggiano al LV epigramma del lib. VII di Marziale, il quale dice:
«Astra polumque tua cepisti mente, Rabiri,

Parrhasiam mira qui struis ante domum;
Phidiaco si digna Jovi dare templa parabit
Has petat a nostro Pisa Tonante manus».
Ma chi non vede che qui Marziale non parla dell’Anfiteatro, bensì
della costruzione di una domum diretta da Rabirio, il quale era
architetto non di Vespasiano ma di Domiziano? E chi ignora che
quando «nell’anno 80 fu solennemente dedicato (l’Anfiteatro) esso
era stato recato a compimento, salvo forse nei particolari
dell’ornamentazione, i quali saranno stati perfezionati dal
Domiziano»? [415].
La terza opinione, finalmente, sostenuta dal Marangoni e da altri
scrittori, attribuisce la direzione del nostro augusto monumento ad
un cristiano di nome Gaudenzio.
Il Nibby [416] dice che ai suoi tempi «i più s’inclinavano ad accettare
quest’opinione». I moderni però la rigettano unanimemente.
Ciò che fece credere al Marangoni e a tutti i seguaci di
quest’opinione che fosse Gaudenzio l’architetto dell’Anfiteatro Flavio,
fu una lapide con iscrizione cristiana rinvenuta nel cimitero di S.
Agnese [417]. Riporto qui le parole del Bellori contemporaneo della
scoperta: «Non pigeat hic inscriptionem veterem advertere quae
Amphitheatri Flavii architecto adscribitur, elapsis annis reperta
erutaque in coemeterio divae Agnetis via Nomentana.... neque
spuria reque recens, sed orthographia et caractheres longe
sequiorem Vespasiano Augusto aetatem indicant» [418].
La paleografia di questa lapide, la quale, come dice il Muratori, già
esisteva presso Pietro da Cortona e schedis Ptolomaeis, ci
riporterebbe (secondo il Nibby) [419] al secolo V dell’êra volgare; ed il
Nibby stesso aggiunge che l’iscrizione non dichiara che Gaudenzio
fosse l’architetto, ma che solo si può dedurre aver Gaudenzio
lavorato in quest’Anfiteatro. Detta epigrafe non è stata mai
pubblicata conforme all’originale. Il Marangoni, il Visconti, il
Marucchi, ecc., ce la presentano in caratteri comuni di stampa; e
benchè l’abbiano riprodotta esattamente riguardo alla disposizione
delle parole, sono stati inesatti riguardo ai segni, i quali dal
Marangoni e dal Marucchi furono espressi tondi, e dal Visconti in
forma di lunghi apici. L’Aringhi, il Venuti, il Nibby, il P. Scaglia ed i
recenti Bollandisti la riproducono altri in caratteri comuni di stampa
(come il Nibby, il Venuti ed i Bollandisti), altri in un fac-simile
arbitrario (come l’Aringhi ed il P. Scaglia); ma tutti inesattamente in
quanto alla disposizione delle parole. Solo l’Aringhi ed il P. Scaglia
esprimono con più verità degli altri la forma degli apici.
Fig. 6.ª
Ora avendo io fortunatamente saputo essersene testè fatto un calco

dal Sig. Attilio Menazzi (una copia del quale si conserva
nell’Accademia di S. Luca) ed avendone potuto avere una fotografia,
posso presentare l’iscrizione nella sua reale genuinità. (Vedi Fig. 6ª).
Nel Gori [420] leggo: «Una lapide marmorea, rinvenuta nelle
catacombe di S. Agnese lungo la via Nomentana, parlando in nome
di un Gaudenzio costruttore di un teatro del crudele Vespasiano, e
che in luogo di essere premiato dalla città da lui nobilitata col detto
monumento, fu condannato a morte pella sua religione cristiana,
indusse nel Marangoni l’opinione che fosse costui l’architetto del
Colosseo. Ma in primo luogo la paleografia irregolare e scorretta di
quest’iscrizione che ho nuovamente copiata nel sotterraneo di S.
Martina, indica chiaramente che non è dell’epoca di Vespasiano o
de’ suoi figli, ma sibbene del V secolo riproduzione forse di qualche
leggenda popolare contraria alla verità storica (sic); giacchè
Vespasiano punì i giudei per la loro ribellione, non perseguitò mai i
cristiani, nemici naturali degli ebrei. In secondo luogo in detta
iscrizione si parla non dell’Anfiteatro Flavio, ma di un teatro costrutto
da Vespasiano (?) non si sa in quale città».
Il Marangoni [421], dal canto suo, ragiona così: «Ella è cosa di
riflessione, come, essendo l’opera di questo Anfiteatro così
eccellente per l’architettura, e di ammirabil lavoro, e giudicata da
Marziale molto più pregevole di tutte le più celebrate maraviglie del
mondo, nè egli nè altri scrittori di quel secolo e de’ susseguenti
abbiano fatta memoria del suo ingegnosissimo architetto. Marziale
stesso, che visse nei tempi di Vespasiano, di Tito e di Domiziano,
celebra con elogio ben singolare quella di Rabirio, architetto di
Domiziano, per la fabbrica di un palagio sul Palatino, dicendo che
avendola eretta emulatrice del cielo conveniva dirsi che la di lui
mente avesse penetrato il cielo e compresa la nobiltà e bellezza
degli astri, avendo fabbricata una casa ad essi somigliantissima [422].
Or quanto più degnamente, e con tutta giustizia, avrebbe dovuto
immortalare il nome e la memoria dell’architetto di questa grande ed
ammirabile opera dell’Anfiteatro, uomo senza dubbio a quei giorni
celebratissimo, ed anche da sè conosciuto. Siami pertanto lecito di
attribuire questo silenzio all’odio di questo ed altri scrittori Gentili di
que’ secoli, che alla cristiana religione portavano, invidiando sì bella
gloria al grande architetto dell’Anfiteatro, per essere egli Cristiano, e
per tal cagione ancora martire di Gesù Cristo.
La congettura (prosegue) sembrami non mal fondata sopra un’antica
iscrizione in marmo, della lunghezza di sette palmi e poco più di uno
largo, che serbasi nella Confessione della chiesa di santa Martina
alle radici del Campidoglio....
Le lettere di questa lapide non sono di eccellente scultura, benchè
fatte in tempo di Vespasiano, in cui fiorivano in Roma le buone arti; e
molte parole di essa non sono staccate: ma ciò non dee recar
maraviglia, posciachè non poterono i fedeli, fra le loro angustie, fare
scolpire questa iscrizione da qualche eccellente maestro gentile; e
perciò anche quasi tutti i monumenti cimiteriali sono per lo più di
cattivi o non ben formati caratteri, quantunque siano de’ tempi
migliori. Di questa iscrizione non fece memoria Marsilio Onorato,
ecc....».
Il tenore dell’epigrafe già noi l’abbiamo veduto. Qui basterà
riportarne la traduzione, che lo stesso Marangoni [423] fa nella nostra
italiana favella:
«Così dunque tu premî, o Vespasiano crudele?

Premiato sei colla morte, o Gaudenzio.
Gioisci, Roma, ove all’autore di tua gloria
Promise quegli, ma ogni premio ti dà Cristo
Che altro teatro ti preparò nel cielo».
«Quivi (continua lo stesso Marangoni) [424], si pone la parola
theatrum per contrapposto all’Anfiteatro, poichè ne’ teatri si
rappresentavano cose gioconde e dilettevoli, e negli Anfiteatri
spettacoli funesti e sanguinosi. Quindi è che questo Gaudenzio
potrebbe dirsi che, essendo cristiano, fosse in premio di aver eretta
questa gran fabbrica, con tanta gloria di Roma, da Vespasiano
stesso fatto morire. Potrebbesi però opporre che Vespasiano non
incrudeli contro i Cristiani; ma a ciò può rispondersi che anche sotto
di lui non mancarono martiri; poichè, sebbene non rinnovò editti
contro di essi, nulladimeno continuava la persecuzione di Nerone:
imperciocchè, per testimonianza del Martirologio Romano, si ha di S.
Apollinare vescovo di Ravenna: 22 Julii. «Qui sub Vespasiano
Caesare gloriosum martyrium consumavit». Inoltre è certo ch’ei fece
ricercare ed uccidere tutti quelli ch’erano della stirpe di David [425], e
che si eccitò una grande strage e persecuzione contro gli Ebrei [426];
e non v’ha dubbio che a quei tempi sotto il nome di Ebrei compresi
erano anche i Cristiani di Roma, come si ha dagli stessi scrittori
Gentili; e specialmente Domiziano, figliuolo di Vespasiano
medesimo, fece morire diversi, qui in mores Judeorum
transierant [427], cioè che abbracciata aveano la cristiana fede: quindi
è che, stante l’addotta iscrizione, potrebbe argomentarsi che
Gaudenzio, perfetto cristiano, fosse stato l’eccellente architetto
dell’Anfiteatro Flavio....».
Questa opinione del Marangoni piacque al Marini, e la disse
elegans [428]. Ma i moderni, ripeto, la rigettano unanimemente;
ritengono la lapide per falsa, e molti attribuiscono la falsificazione a
Pirro Ligorio. A dire il vero, quando comparve la lapide, Pirro Ligorio
era già morto da più di un mezzo secolo: sarebbe stato meglio
l’avessero questi attribuita ad un redivivo Ligorio, come si espresse il
De Rossi a riguardo delle poche lapidi cristiane falsificate.
«Nunquam in Christianis epitaphiis acclamatio ad imperatorem
apparet» scrive il P. Sisto O. C. R. [429], nelle sue Notiones
Archaeologiae Christianae. La forma delle lettere, aggiunge il
Mantechi, i segni d’interpunzione, l’intiero testo, rivelano la falsità
dell’iscrizione (di Gaudenzio)» [430].
È certo che la paleografia di quest’epigrafe, come pure la sua
dicitura, non è affatto ordinaria; e nessuno potrà senza dubitarne
asserire, come fece il Marangoni, che quella lapide sia dei tempi dei
Flavî. Ma chi ne sarà stato l’autore? A quale scopo questa
falsificazione? Non forse per speculazione, come fanno gli odierni
spacciatori di antichità? Ovvero per ingannare i posteri?... Nell’uno e
nell’altro caso dobbiam dire che il falsificatore non si sarebbe
manifestato molto atto ed esperto nel suo vile officio. Difatti, o che la
lapide sia stata falsificata a scopo di lucro, o a fine d’ingannare; in
ambedue i casi il falsificatore avrebbe dovuto imitare un po’ meglio la
paleografia e lo stile dell’epoca. Oltre a questo perchè nasconderla e
sotterrarla nel cimitero di S. Agnese?
A suo luogo [431] esamineremo particolareggiatamente tutte e singole
le opinioni, e vedremo il loro valore. Fin d’ora però dobbiamo
dichiarare arbitraria l’osservazione del Gori [432]; giacchè la lapide
«Sic premia servas» non può essere «una riproduzione di qualche
leggenda popolare contraria alla verità storica»; e non può essere
per la semplicissima ragione che la verità storica circa l’architetto del
Colosseo è finora ignota a tutti.
CAPITOLO QUARTO.
Spettacoli celebrati nell’Anfiteatro Flavio dall’inaugurazione al
secolo VI, ed abolizione dei medesimi.
Nel capo primo già descrivemmo le sontuosissime feste celebrate in

Roma, in occasione dell’inaugurazione dell’Anfiteatro fatta da Tito
nell’anno 80 dell’êra nostra. Ora passiamo a ricordare gli spettacoli
che vi diedero i suoi successori, fino al secolo VI.
Domiziano (81-96), figlio di Vespasiano e fratello di Tito, fece
celebrare durante il suo impero, sontuosi spettacoli in
quell’Anfiteatro, che egli avea portato a perfetto compimento. Di
questi giuochi ce ne parla Suetonio [433]; e fra i varî spettacoli vi fu
pur data una pugna navale. Ma avvedutosi Domiziano che
l’Anfiteatro non si prestava ai grandi combattimenti navali, fè
costruire presso il Tevere una naumachia, il cui materiale fu poscia
impiegato da Traiano al risarcimento dei due fianchi del Circo
Massimo, che s’erano incendiati [434]. In questa naumachia si
potevano azzuffare delle vere flotte [435]; ma tali giuochi non son da
confondersi con la pugna navale che Domiziano diè nell’Anfiteatro
Flavio.
Domiziano amò assai le venationes e gli spettacoli gladiatorî; e
talvolta, perfin di notte, alla luce delle faci, assisteva ai certami esibiti
non solo dagli uomini ma pur dalle donne; e per tutto il tempo degli
spettacoli intrattenevasi, talor seriamente, con un fanciullo, puerulus,
che gli stava ai piedi vestito di scarlatto, coccinatus, e che era una
maraviglia per la sua portentosa sebben piccola testa [436].
Io penso che questo fanciullo portentoso parvoque capite, prediletto
da Domiziano e col quale fabulabatur nonnumquam serio, possa
essere l’undicenne Q. Sulpicio Massimo coronato dallo stesso
Domiziano in Campidoglio, per avere, nel concorso poetico indetto
nel terzo lustro o certame dell’agone capitolino, riportato l’onore del
primato sopra cinquantadue competitori, grecamente poetando: il cui
sepolcro venne in luce nel 1871 nel demolire la torre destra della
Porta Salaria [437].
Un dì, seduto sulle gradinate dell’Anfiteatro, trovavasi un padre di
famiglia, il quale, parlando, asserì che «un Trece o Mirmillone, non
poteva paragonarsi a quel gladiatore che allora dava uno spettacolo
al popolo». Risaputolo Domiziano ordinò che dai gradus quegli
passasse tosto nell’arena, e divenisse preda dei cani. Dietro le
spalle gli mise la scritta: «Empiamente ha parlato questo
parmulario», ossia fautore dei Traci, i quali, come si disse
nell’introduzione, erano armati di parma [438].
Marziale [439] scrisse l’ultimo epigramma dopo la morte di Domiziano;
poichè dice di lui che più giovevole cosa sarebbe stata alla gente
Flavia il non avere avuto i due degnissimi Imperatori Vespasiano e
Tito, che l’aver sortito questo terzo Cesare, malvagio e
scelleratissimo.
Domiziano fu uno dei più bravi arcieri [440]; talvolta prendeva di mira
la palma destra di un fanciullo, che, in lontananza, teneva stesa, e vi
dirigeva le frecce con tant’arte da farle passare innocue fra gli
intervalli delle dita [441].
Nell’anfiteatro della sua villa Albana fe’ combattere cogli strali, da
vicino e senza armatura, contro gli orsi della Numidia, Acilio
Glabrione, il quale fu console nell’anno 91 dell’êra volgare:
Profuit ergo nihil misero quod cominus ursos

Figebat numidas albana nudus arena [442].
Lo stesso Imperatore uccideva a centinaia le belve di vario genere, e

tra queste uccise un enorme leone africano [443].
Se giuochi tanto magnifici faceva celebrare in Albano, quanto più
sontuosi non li avrà dati nell’Anfiteatro Flavio? Marziale, che fu il
descrittore ufficiale degli spettacoli celebrati sotto i Flavî nel nostro
Anfiteatro, ci dà una chiara idea della singolarità e magnificenza dei
suddetti spettacoli esibiti al popolo. «Una donna, dice il poeta, vinse
ed uccise un leone. Uno dei più grandi facinorosi venne affisso ad
una croce, ed esposto non ad un falso orso, come nella commedia di
Nevio il mimo ed attore Laureolo, sibbene ad un vero orso della
Caledonia, che lo sbranò [444]. Un condannato, che, come Dedalo,
dovea volare per isfuggire agli artigli di un orso, cadde a terra, e fu
lacerato dalla belva [445]. Un rinoceronte col corno palleggiò un
toro [446]. Un leone, che avea ferito il suo maestro o mansuetario
mentre lo percuoteva, fu per ordine dell’Imperatore, ucciso colle
frecce [447]. Un orso, che, per difendere la testa dai colpi del
bestiario, se la copriva colle zampe anteriori, e, facendo la ruota,
fuggiva per la sanguinosa arena; fu costretto a fermarsi, rimasto
preso al vischio come un uccello [448]. Il bestiario Carpoforo meritò di
essere anteposto a Meleagro e ad Ercole, perchè, nello stesso
giorno e nello stesso spettacolo, uccise venti fiere: tra le quali due
giovenche, un bufalo, un bisonte, un orso ed un leone di gran mole,
insieme ad un velocissimo pardo [449]. Una macchina elevò in alto
nel mezzo dell’arena un toro, sul cui dorso era stata imposta l’effigie
di Domiziano camuffato da Ercole [450]. Simili macchine si
lavoravano, come abbiam detto, nell’officina summum choragium; ed
erano composte con tanta maestria, che da sè medesime si
elevavano, mandando in alto i varî piani in esse occultamente
contenuti; variavano inoltre di forma, o svolgendosi le parti che erano
unite, o riunendosi per sè stesse le dispiegate, od abbassandosi
lentamente le elevate; e su di esse apparivano talvolta i gladiatori,
fuochi dilettevoli ed altre sorprese di questo genere. Un elefante,
dopo aver ucciso un toro, s’inginocchiò innanzi a Domiziano [451];
una tigre riuscì a lacerare un leone (cosa nuova e non mai prima
avvenuta) e un toro, che, stimolato colle fiamme per tutta l’arena,
aveva colle corna alzato in aria molti fantocci, pilae, e che rimase in
ultimo ucciso da un elefante, il quale lo palleggiò alla sua volta colla
proboscide [452]».
Sotto lo stesso Domiziano venne accomodata l’arena del nostro
Anfiteatro in modo da rappresentare Rodope, nella cui sottoposta
pianura, come in un teatro, Orfeo cantava, e intorno a lui ballavano
scogli e selve con ogni genere di uccelli e di animali mansueti e
feroci. Orfeo era rappresentato da un reo, il quale rimase lacerato da
un ingrato orso [453]. I fanciulli si aggrappavano alle corna dei tori; o,
correndo essi sulle groppe dei medesimi, agitavano tela, venabuli ed
aste, senza ricevere nocumento di sorta [454].
Altri spettacoli somiglianti ci ricorda lo stesso Marziale: spettacoli
magnifici e straordinarî, che noi, per brevità, tralasciamo di riferire.
Traiano amò moltissimo gli spettacoli venatorî e gladiatorî [455] e ne

fece dare in gran copia e di magnifici. L’Henzen [456] scrisse: Ipse
vero Traianus, ut vir bellicosus ac fortis, valde iis laetatus est,
triumphos suos venationibus ac gladiatorum muneribus
magnificentissimis ornavit. Pel suo trionfo Dacico (a. 108) fece
combattere nell’Anfiteatro 11,000 belve feroci e 10,000
gladiatori [457]. «Questi spettacoli, dice il Gori [458], ebbero luogo non
solo nell’Anfiteatro Flavio, ma anche in quello edificato da Traiano.
Pausania infatti scrive, che questo Imperatore costrusse un gran
teatro rotondo [459], ossia un anfiteatro,(?) posto, secondo Sparziano,
nel Campo Marzio e distrutto in seguito da Adriano contro il voto di
tutti [460], non già perchè Adriano fosse nemico degli spettacoli
anfiteatrali, ma perchè si era dichiarato rivale di Apollodoro, celebre
architetto di cui servivasi Traiano».
Qual fosse le scopo prefissosi dal Gori, nel creare nuovi anfiteatri, lo
vedremo nella IV parte (quest. terza) di questo lavoro. Ora mi limito
a dire che Sparziano non usa la voce amphitheatrum, ma theatrum:
se uno scrittore greco usasse la parola θέατρον per denotare un
anfiteatro, non recherebbe maraviglia, giacchè sappiamo che ai
Greci poco piacque usare la voce anfiteatro; ma che uno scrittore
romano chiamasse teatro un anfiteatro, è incredibile. Il Lanciani [461]
dice: «Pausania registra fra le grandi opere di Traiano in Roma.....
theatrum magnum undequaque rotundum, cioè l’Anfiteatro Flavio. È
una inesatta asserzione del geografo....». Il teatro perciò fatto
edificare da Traiano nel Campo Marzio non possiamo dirlo
anfiteatro; e se quest’Imperatore avesse dato, come vuole il Gori,
spettacoli nel suo teatro, questi al più sarebbero stati i gladiatorî; non
mai le venationes, le quali erano, direi impossibili in edificî di tal
natura, e che, come già si disse, dopo l’invenzione degli anfiteatri si
celebrarono constantemente in questi e si bandirono financo dai
circhi [462].
Anche Adriano si dilettò di dar giuochi nel nostro Anfiteatro. Alle

volte egli stesso scendeva sull’arena; e una volta riuscì ad uccidere
di propria mano un leone. Durante gli spettacoli, imitando Tito nei
100 giorni della dedicazione dell’Anfiteatro, gettava (separatamente
agli uomini e alle donne) globoli o palle con entro diversi donativi. In
Atene esibì nello stadio la caccia di 1000 fiere; in Roma fè uccidere
molte fiere, 100 leoni ed altrettante leonesse; e nell’anniversario del
suo natale, per 6 giorni continui, diè lo spettacolo di ludi gladiatorî e
la caccia di 1000 fiere [463].
Adriano ordinò: Decoctores bonorum suorum, si suae auctoritatis
essent, catomidiari in amphitheatro, et dimitti iussit [464]; questo
castigo fu ben descritto da Prudenzio [465].
Solenni spettacoli fè celebrare Antonino Pio nell’Anfiteatro Flavio.

Mostrò tigri, elefanti, crocute [466], strepsiceroti [467], coccodrilli,
ippopotami ed altri animali, ricercati in ogni parte del mondo: in una
sola giornata mostrò cento leoni: Edita munera in quibus elephantos
et crocutas et strepsicerotas et crocodilos etiam hippopotamos, et
omnia ex toto orbe terrarum cum tigridibus exhibuit. Centum etiam
leones una missione edidit [468].
Nella guerra contro i Marcomanni [469] Marc’Aurelio arruolò
moltissimi gladiatori; e gli spettacoli che fe’ dare nell’Anfiteatro
furono tanto splendidi che in una sola missione presentò insieme e
fece uccidere cogli strali 100 leoni [470].
Ma i ludi più superbi e più magnifici ebbero ivi luogo imperando
Commodo.
Più crudele di Domiziano e più impuro di Nerone, provava egli
particolar diletto negli spettacoli sanguinarî. Se tal feroce
inclinazione fosse in lui perchè nato di adulterio commesso da
Faustina sua madre con un gladiatore, secondo alcuni; o perchè
concepito, come altri vogliono, dopo che Faustina si era lavata col
sangue di un gladiatore svenato, del quale s’era invaghita [471], lo
ignoriamo: certo, il fatto ci mostra che Commodo si manifestò
piuttosto quale figlio di un gladiatore, che principe generato dal
filosofo M. Aurelio.
Frequentò la schola dei gladiatori, e sovente al par degli altri, nudo o
velate le spalle con un semplice panno purpureo, entrava all’arena,
brandiva il ferro, e comandava che i gladiatori pugnassero con lui.
Questi alla più leggiera ferita si dichiaravano vinti; e, prostrati ai suoi
piedi, qual trionfante lo veneravano. In tal guisa vinse mille gladiatori;
e per celebrare la sua valentia fece troncare la testa al colosso del
Sole, del quale a suo luogo parleremo, e in luogo di quella ne fè
porre un’altra che presentava le sue sembianze; poi nella base della
statua appose la scritta:
MILLE GLADIATORVM VICTOR

(Lampridio)
Ordinò che si registrassero i nomi di tutti i gladiatori da lui vinti; si

celebrassero i suoi trionfi nelle pubbliche memorie, e s’aggiungesse
che pugnò 635 volte. Nel nostro Anfiteatro uccise di propria mano,
con saette, molte fiere; scoccava l’arco con somma destrezza, e
sempre colpiva. Fè fabbricare una macchina, che si disse
περιδρομος, intorno alla quale egli girava per non essere offeso
dalle bestie: e fu così che potè uccidere una quantità di cervi, daini,
tori, leoni, pantere, ecc., senza essere obbligato a replicare il colpo.
Una volta una pantera si scagliò contro di un uomo. Commodo tende
il suo arco, e le assesta una frecciata sì opportuna, che la fiera cade
ai piedi del malcapitato. Lampridio racconta anche che una volta
Commodo apparve nell’Anfiteatro Flavio vestito in modo strano.
Ecco come: egli amava una sua donna, ed aveva il suo ritratto
ov’era dipinta in forma di Amazzone. Un bel giorno dunque si veste
anche egli da amazzone, si porta all’Anfiteatro e si fa acclamare col
titolo di Amazzonio.
Spesso assisteva agli spettacoli anfiteatrali vestito da donna:
durante i quali, e contro le leggi, beveva; ed una volta, credendosi
schernito dagli spettatori, i quali invece l’acclamavano qual dio,
ordinò ai soldati della marina, destinati a tendere il velario, che
uccidessero tutti gli accorsi all’Anfiteatro. Dicevasi Ercole, e diè
ordine d’incendiare Roma, come colonia sua; ma ciò non avvenne
perchè fu dissuaso da Leto, prefetto del Pretorio. Fra i nomi assunti
da Commodo vi fu quello di Capo dei secutori [472]: capo, cioè, di
quei gladiatori i quali, come vedemmo nell’introduzione, inseguivano
i reziarî, Palus primus Secutorum per la secentesima volta.
Dal palazzo, o casa Commodiana Palatina, si trasferì alla casa
Vectiliana sul Celio, adducendo a pretesto che in quello gli spettri
turbavano i suoi sonni. Contro ogni consuetudine, ordinò che gli
spettatori assistessero agli spettacoli non togati, ma vestiti del
gabbano (paenula) come nei funerali; ed egli stesso talvolta
presiedeva ai giuochi in veste di color bruno. Per due volte gli cadde
l’elmo alla porta Libitinensis, che era quella porta per la quale negli
anfiteatri si estraevano fuori dell’arena i cadaveri dei gladiatori [473].
Poco prima che Commodo morisse, già da sè stesso erasi
procacciati auguri funesti. Erodiano narra che Lucilla, sorella di
Commodo, tramò la famosa congiura contro la vita del fratello.
Quinziano faceva parte di questa congiura: apparteneva all’ordine
senatorio, ed era di animo pronto ed audace. Un giorno questi si
nascose in quell’oscuro andito che noi già descrivemmo nel cap.
terzo; e, veduto comparire l’Imperatore, snudò improvvisamente il
pugnale, e ad alta voce esclamò: «il Senato ti manda questo!» Ma
mentre così parlava e stoltamente ostentava il nudo pugnale, venne
arrestato dalle guardie, e condannato a morte insieme cogli altri
congiurati [474].
Mai s’era visto nè udito, dice lo stesso storico, che un Imperatore
sfidasse i più rinomati gladiatori, ed uccidesse di propria mano tante
fiere. Sicchè da ogni angolo d’Italia e dalle regioni finitime
accorrevano le genti in Roma, per assistere a quegli straordinarî
spettacoli.
Nel giorno stabilito, il nostro Anfiteatro rigurgitava di gente.
Commodo scendeva sull’arena, e in destrezza superava i più
eccellenti tiratori di arco (i Parti) ed i più bravi lanciatori di giavelotti (i
Numidi). Dione, anch’esso ascritto all’ordine senatorio, racconta le
prodezze ed i combattimenti di Commodo [475]. Alle sue Storie
Romane rimettiamo coloro che bramassero averne una contezza
particolareggiata. Noi, per non essere troppo prolissi, ci limitiamo a
ricordare sommariamente che Commodo, prima di portarsi
all’Anfiteatro, soleva indossare una tunica serica con maniche,
bianca e trinata di oro. Dione e tutti i senatori lo salutavano ornato di
quell’abito. Lungo la via che conduceva all’Anfiteatro, si portava
innanzi ad esso la pelle di un leone e la clava. «Nel primo giorno
(dice Dione) ei solo, Commodo, uccise cento leoni, girando intorno
alla banchina posta sotto il podio. Tutto l’Anfiteatro era stato diviso
da diametri connessi, con tetto e peridromo [476], i quali tagliavano
l’Anfiteatro in doppia direzione [477] per potere con dardi più
facilmente trafiggere le belve».
Racconta lo stesso storico che Commodo scese dal luogo più
elevato al piano dell’Anfiteatro; e qualunque bestia da macello che a
lui s’avvicinava, tosto l’uccideva; e che inoltre fece cadere una tigre,
un ippopotamo ed un elefante. Dopo il pranzo entrava nella pugna
gladiatoria....... Con esso pugnavano i maestri dei giuochi, ed anche
altri gladiatori.... dai quali in altro non differiva che in questo: essi
discendevano nell’arena per poche monete, mentre Commodo si

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Florence in The Early Modern World

New Perspectives 1st Edition Nicholas

Archaeological Perspectives on the French in the New

The Culture and Politics of Regime Change in Italy c

The Powers of Sound and Song in Early Modern Paris 1st

Communication Translation and Community in the Middle

The Reality of the Social World Medieval Early Modern

Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global

Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World 2nd

Rotter Nation 1st Edition Scott M Baker

Nicholas Scott Baker is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Macquarie

Brian Jeffrey Maxson is Associate Professor of History at East Tennessee State

Series Editor: Natasha Hodgson, Nottingham Trent University.

War in the Iberian Peninsula, 700–1600

Writing War in Britain and France, 1370–1854: A History of Emotions

Drama in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Playmakers and their

Florence in the Early Modern World: New Perspectives

Edited by Nicholas Scott Baker and

ISBN: 978-1-138-31330-9 (hbk)

List of tables vii

1 Where in the world is Renaissance Florence? Challenges

2 Taking architectural theory on the road: the sliding scales

3 “Tutto il mondo è paese”: locating Florence in premodern

4 Mapping gendered labor in the textile industry of

5 Shaping the city and the landscape: politics, public space,

6 Nelle parti di Romagna: the role and influence of the

7 The advantages of stability: Medici Tuscany’s ambitions

8 The Medici, maritime empire, and the enduring legacy

9 Poggio’s beginnings at the papal curia: the Florentine

10 The myth of the Renaissance bubble: international culture

11 New perspectives on patria: the Andreini performance

2.1 1338: Villani’s Florence: a machine for living 25

2.1 Map of Florence showing the fourteenth-century wall

4.4 Female winders (“incanna”) by street in Florence (1632) 84

Brian Jeffrey Maxson is Associate Professor of History at East Tennessee State

Nicholas Scott Baker and Brian Jeffrey Maxson

sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. In spite of centrifugal forces—the increasing

24 For an excellent analysis of the Florentine commercial network see Richard A.

Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) declared that one

of the greatest pleasures . . . and one worthy of a free man, is to wander

professionals, or merchants—were deeply engaged in how their city ought to look

Ragionare: taking account of the city

FIGURE 2.1  ap of Florence showing the fourteenth-century wall circuit and

TABLE 2.1 1338: Villani’s Florence: a machine for living

contemporaries.31 Villani was caught right in the middle of such transformations

Benedetto Dei’s lists: counting and measuring

Wandering toward Jerusalem

populated by 60,000 Jews, Muslims, and Christians. He describes the multi-ethnic

L’operazione di tendere il velario si eseguiva sul terrazzo

Nel centro v’è un foro circolare del diametro di m. 0,045: in esso fu

Questo raro istrumento trovato presso il Colosseo, appartenne alla

Non sarebbe certo irragionevole opinare, che, sull’alto dell’Anfiteatro,

La forma dell’anemoscopio rinvenuto presso il Colosseo è

Dopo d’aver contemplato così minutamente questa stupenda mole,

«Astra polumque tua cepisti mente, Rabiri,

Ora avendo io fortunatamente saputo essersene testè fatto un calco

«Così dunque tu premî, o Vespasiano crudele?

Nel capo primo già descrivemmo le sontuosissime feste celebrate in

FIGURE 2.1 ap of Florence showing the fourteenth-century wall circuit and