Franco Cardini - A Short History of Florence

A SHORT

HISTORY

OF FLORENCE

franco

cardini

Copyright 1999 by Pacini Editore

ISBN 978-88-6315-096-4

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First digital edition 2011

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Preface

Florence belongs to that small group of cities whose history may be told too amply in a few lines or too sketchily in many volumes. A true history of Florence, a history concerned with the heart of the story - like the true history of Rome or Athens or Jerusalem - is in the end the history of our entire civilisation; the writer who looks into it deeply enough finds it so rich that even the fullest, most analytical account of it could not do it justice.

But for this very reason, perhaps, a Short History may be useful to many readers, from the student to the more focused type of tourist to the Florentine who would feel discouraged faced with a full treatment of the subject but who does not want to give up the search for a vademecum, which will help him draw from his experience, his memories, his sensations, and his feelings too, an all-inclusive image of a remarkable - a unique - city .

To call Florence remarkable and unique does not exempt one from the duty of reflecting on her history and attempting rational comment. What has made her what she is, over the centuries? How can she still be considered exceptional today? Is there real fascination there, apart from media hyp and the tourist industry? And her history, which someone called splendid, hasnt it got another face?

A history book, however brief, has as its object a past, recent or distant, but it is written in and for the present. When an essay like this one has as its aim the original characteristics of a great artistic centre which is also a great twentieth-century city with its problems and its crises, it is even more urgent that the essay furnish answers that will limit the characteristics and historical assumptions of those problems and crises. And in a city like Florence, afflicted with confusion and decay which one can seek to explain but not deny, such a task is neither easy nor pleasant.

There is not a city in the world that does not feel, for good or ill, the weight of its past. But in Florence, and for Florence, this weight is on the one hand crushing, while on the other hand it is the thing that shapes the life of today. At the urban and monumental level, this tallies very obviously, even if perhaps with less dramaticity than in Venice (but much more than happens for many other historic centres). It is, all the same, the heritage of the past in terms of cultural and traditional significance that still conditions life, the nature of society, the policies, the tastes, the economy and the image of Florence and the Florentines. Here the past is not simply past: it is an integral part of the present, one lives it - indeed one relives it, one even re-invents it - as the present, one plays it over again as if it were indivisibly bound to the present. From the significance of Florence in the Risorgimento - the ballot boxes of the strong in Santa Croce, the Arno in which they came to dip their clothes in that Italian language without which no plausible plan of uniting Italy could have been envisaged - to her most modern and recent political proposals, or the most in images of crafts and high quality fashion which still bring Florence to the attention of the world, there is no aspect of the life of the city or of the activities of her people which does not give the impression of being first and foremost a kind of paper currency which is valued because it is guaranteed by the gold reserves of the Florentine past. It is a past made of memory, a memory of the political past, as well as of art, churches and museums.

This is a city unlike any other, yet a universal city; a city in some ways enclosed - more than she seems - in a sort of lingering, grim provincialism of which she is at times downright proud; but at the same time a city that can truly claim to be the glory of the world. Between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries she was well able to dominate, by various rights and in various ways, a regional state, Tuscany; and when she became part of a broader, national unit, to whose cultural identity and justification she had contributed, she became for a short time the nations capital. But she was born to be what she is, and this role was too restricting. Florence owes her role to the freedom and enterprise of the Florentines, to their capacity to look beyond the temporal limits of the present and the geographical limits of the peninsula. For this reason - without denying the importance of the prospects that opened up in the new Italy of 1860 - we have chosen to stop this brief history at the double loss of independence and dominion over the other Tuscan cities. If post-unification Florence meant something, indeed a great deal, to united Italy, it was owing to the memory of - and in some measure to the pride in and nostalgia for - the days of Florentine liberty and those of the Medici Princes. This profile of Florentine history sets out to present not so much the events and institutions of the city as a search for the characteristics that make up her identity.