Florence: Great City of the Renaissance - Italy - page 89

90
TASTING BISTECCA ALLA FIORENTINA AT TRATTORIA LE
FONTICINE Yum. Order the city's specialty: a thick juicy steak prepared in an
open wood-fired oven. The aroma and smoke waft around this famous family
restaurant. Wash your steak down with some Chianti and finish off with gelato.
ENJOYING THE MEALTIME THEATER AT TEATRO DEL SALE The
chef announces the upcoming entrees by screaming from a window in the
kitchen. Diners jockey for spots near the huge buffet-style serving table. After din-
ner, sit back and enjoy the onstage entertainment at this superb supper club.
VISITING THE SHOPS OF OLTRARNO See fifth-generation artisans prac-
ticing their craft in family workshops on the south side of the historic Ponte
Vecchio.
CHEERING ON ACF FIORENTINA Join the people of Florence as they root
for the ACF Fiorentina, which competes for the championship of Italy's elite Serie
A soccer league.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF FLORENCE
Julius Caesar founded the city of Florentia as an encampment by the Arno river
in 59 B . C . Veterans of his Roman legions later decided that the flat plain by the
river would be a good place to settle (and, notwithstanding a few thousand years
of floods, it was).
Florence grew to prominence in the early Middle Ages, as guilds evolved into
textile businesses. It gained independence in 1125, electing a council of 100 of
the richest merchants to rule the city. The most powerful families then branched
out to create the world's first private banking industry, amassing incredible wealth
along the way. By the late Middle Ages, Florence was the city in Europe, support-
ing a population of well over 100,000. Their loans and investments financed
kings and popes alike, and attracted the top artistic talent money could buy.
The same outlays brought in a huge amount of international trade, and by the
mid-1300s this crowded and unsanitary medieval city was an epicenter of com-
merce. Shipments of spices, silks, and slaves arrived daily from the Orient via the
ports of Pisa, Mantua, and Venice. Among these imports in 1348 was the bacil-
lus responsible for the Black Death (buried in the bellies of fleas riding the backs
of black rats). What soon became known as the Florentine Plague swept like a
tsunami through the city, then the region, then all of Europe, killing nearly a third
of the continent's population. In Florence and Tuscany, the plague hit hardest,
wiping out half the citizens in the first year, and then flaring up again over the
next 3 decades.
The Florentine Renaissance, meaning “rebirth,” was certainly in full bloom by
the year 1400, a date that coincides with Ghiberti's commission to create the
doors of the Baptistery outside the Duomo. Not only did the city experience a
reawakening following the devastation of the plague, but the artists and intellec-
tuals of the day began to take an interest in the ancient Greeks and Romans, reviv-
ing their humanistic ideals and reverence for nature. You can still see the influence
of this movement in the realistic carvings on Ghiberti's doors, and in the engi-
neering feats (some of them derived from close study of the Pantheon in Rome)