ancient cities

276 Florence, Italy
A view of Florence, as well as the Ponte Vecchio—the oldest of the city's six bridges—seen in the foreground
Source: David Ferrell.
the Ponte Santa Trinità (1258), indicate the growth
of the city, the scale of traffic in people and goods,
and the increasing importance of the Oltrarno.
The city’s last circuit of walls was designed by
Arnolfo di Cambio and begun in 1284, enclosing
an area 24 times the size of the Roman castrum;
they protected not only the urban fabric—the old
gridded core and the streets extending from it in
all directions to the regional road network—
but also large areas of semirural land. The mendicant
orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Servites,
Carmelites) settled during the middle of the 1200s
in the loosely organized zone outside the twelfthcentury
circuit of walls. The Dominicans and
Franciscans in particular—at their centers of Santa
Maria Novella on the west and Santa Croce on the
east sides of town, respectively—also offered large
piazzas that served the crowds who came to hear
popular itinerant preachers.
Their ambitious building enterprises attracted
artisans and tradespeople to their neighborhoods,
while their theological schools (studium generale)
made them internationally known centers of scholarship.
The monastic complexes, not responsible
to the local bishop but instead to their own order’s
hierarchy and ultimately to Rome, were physically
and politically independent of their urban context;
they had extensive land with gardens and livestock,
making them effectively self-sufficient.
Numerous hospitals were also scattered throughout
the zone between the twelfth- and early-
fourteenth-century circuits of walls. These served
pilgrims, the rural poor who filtered into the city
looking for work, and the urban poor; essentially
caretaking hospices, they mediated the effects of
the population growth of the burgeoning late
medieval city. Like the monastic complexes, they
could be large and self-sufficient; estimates are that
they provided roughly one bed per hundred citizens.
They would be stretched to capacity and
beyond by the plague, the Black Death, which
struck in 1348 and reduced the population by
nearly 40 percent.
The Palazzo del Podestà (now Bargello), begun
in 1255, was the first permanent home of the communal
government; it was soon replaced by the
Palazzo del Popolo (begun 1299; now Palazzo
Vecchio) on the site of the old Roman theater.
Wrapped by the Piazza della Signoria, it occupied
a hinge point between the edge of the Roman grid
and the network of streets oriented toward the
river. Its large bell tower established the civic pole