ancient cities

the city projects to the world. Founded by the
Romans, the city recovered from the collapse of
the empire to become a leading commercial and
banking center in the Middle Ages and an important
cultural center at the dawn of the Renaissance.
Following two centuries of relative stagnation, the
city emerged temporarily as the capital of Italy in
1865 and underwent substantial urban redevelopment.
In the twentieth century and beyond, while
confronting industrialization, sprawl, the devastation
of World War II, and lately mass tourism, the
historic center continues to be an urban model.
History
The Ancient City and the Collapse
of the Roman Empire
The city the Romans called Florentia was founded
in 59 BC by Julius Caesar on a plain near the banks
of the Arno River, at a narrow spot where crossing
was easiest (the Etruscans had founded a town
much earlier on the hillside to the north on the site
of modern day Fiesole). The new town was laid out
as a castrum: proceeding from a central umbilicus,
the surveyor (agrimensor) established the principal
east–west and north–south streets (the decumanus
and cardo, respectively), defined the limits of the
town, and laid out the gridded network of streets;
the forum was located near the umbilicus. Its position
near the wider Roman road network (especially
the Via Cassia) helped the town to flourish. The
leisure components missing from the original foundation—a
theater, amphitheater, baths, and so onwere
established beyond the original wall circuit in
the first and second centuries AD.
Set out on the cardinal axes, Florentia only
approximately responded to the course of the river
and was removed from it by the equivalent of a
few blocks; a wooden bridge extended from the
southern end of the cardo to span the Arno toward
a small suburb pinched between the riverbanks
and the hills rising to the south. This original
Roman urban framework—cardo and decumanus,
grid, walls, and to a certain extent bridge—is still
evident when looking at a map or aerial photograph
of the modern city.
Florence, like Rome itself, achieved a degree of
stability after the collapse of the western empire and
its replacement by the Byzantines, albeit at a much
reduced scale—first under the Ostragoths and later
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the Lombards. New walls were introduced well
inside the original Roman circuit, corresponding to
the shrunken population (from 20,000 under the
Romans to perhaps as few as 1,000). By AD 500,
however, the foundation of the city’s two principal
churches, San Lorenzo (the first cathedral) and Santa
Reparata (the future site of the Duomo), indicates a
degree of modest recovery, in part because these
structures were located outside the reduced mural
circuit. These vulnerable centers of devotion are precursors
of later ecclesiastical foundations that would
push the city’s growth outward from the twelfth
through the fourteenth centuries. Near the end of
Lombard rule, perhaps during the seventh century,
the Baptistery was built facing Santa Reparata; its
role as the site of baptism for every Florentine citizen
made it an urban focus on par with the Duomo.
Carolingian Recovery and
Medieval Consolidation
A late-ninth-century circuit of walls marks the
beginning of Florence’s growth in the Carolingian
era; larger than the Byzantine circuit but still
smaller than the Roman enclosure, these walls
protected a population of perhaps 5,000. Monastic
communities began to settle in the outskirts of the
city; the Benedictines founded San Miniato on a
hill south of the Arno in 1018; its façade and that
of the Baptistery were sheathed in polychrome
marble in the next century. Another circuit of
walls was built under Countess Matilda in 1078,
extending beyond the most ancient walls to the
north and south to the river. By this time, the
city’s population equaled that of the Roman city.
The second-to-last circuit of walls was built
between 1173 and 1175, enclosing an area almost
five times the size of the original Roman enceinte.
These walls crossed the Arno to capture the burgeoning
district known as the Oltrarno—they
also, therefore, protected the oldest bridge across
the river, the Ponte Vecchio (originally on the site
of the Roman bridge, it was eventually relocated
slightly and rebuilt in its final form in 1345).
Three new bridges followed in the next century.
The Florence of Dante and the Black Death
The new bridges built beyond the twelfth-
century walls, the Ponte alla Carraia (1218–1220),
the Ponte Rubaconte (1237, now alle Grazie), and