Florence
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PENGUIN BOOKS
FLORENCE
Christopher Hibbert was born in Leicestershire in 1924 and educated at Radley and Oriel College, Oxford. He served as an infantry officer during the war, was twice wounded and was awarded the military cross in 1945. Described in the New Statesman as ‘a pearl of biographers’, he is, in the words of The Times Educational Supplement, ‘perhaps the most gifted popular historian we have’. His many highly acclaimed books include the following titles, most of which are published in Penguin: The Destruction of Lord Raglan (which won the Heinemann Award for Literature in 1962); London: The Biography of a City; The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici; The Great Mutiny: India 1857; The French Revolution; Garibaldi and his Enemies; Rome: The Biography of a City; Nelson: A Personal History; George III: A Personal History and The Marlboroughs: John and Sarah Churchill 1650 – 744.
Christopher Hibbert is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Hon. D. Litt. of Leicester University. He is married with two sons and a daughter, and lives in Henley-on-Thames.
By the same author
MILITARY HISTORY
Wolfe at Quebec
The Destruction of Lord Raglan: A Tragedy of the Crimean War Corunna
The Battle of Arnhem
Agincourt
Redcoats and Rebels: The War for America, 1770 – 1781
Cavaliers and Roundheads: The English at War, 1642 – 1649
HISTORY
King Mob: Lord George Gordon and the riots of 1780
The Roots of Evil: A Social History of Crime and Punishment
The Court at Windsor: A Domestic History
The Grand Tour
London: The Biography of a City
The Dragon Wakes: China and the West, 1793 – 1911
The Rise and Fall of the House of the Medici
The Great Mutiny: India 1857
The French Revolution
Rome: The Biography of a City
The English: A Social History 1066 – 1945
Venice: The Biography of a City
BIOGRAPHIES
Benito Mussolini: The Rise and Fall of Il Duce
Garibaldi and His Enemies: The Clash of Arms and Personalities in the Making of Italy
The Making of Charles Dickens
Charles I
The Personal History of Samuel Johnson
George IV: Prince of Wales, 1762 – 1811
George VI: Regent and King, 1811 – 1830
Edward VII: A Portrait
Queen Victoria in Her Letters and Journals
Elizabeth I: A Personal History of the Virgin Queen
Nelson: A Personal History
George III: A Personal History
The Marlboroughs: John and Sarah Churchill 1650 – 1744
Christopher Hibbert
FLORENCE
THE BIOGRAPHY OF A CITY
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.co.uk
First published by Viking 1993
Published in Penguin Books 1994
Reissued in 2004
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Copyright © Christopher Hibbert,1993
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Line drawings by Ursula Seiger
Maps by Reginald Piggott
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192624-7
For Bruce Hunter with gratitude and affection
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ILLUSTRATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
AUTHOR'S NOTE
MAPS
1. The Roman City, 59 BC–AD 405
2. Marauders, Emperors and Margraves, 405 – 1115
3. Merchants, Guelphs and Ghibellines, 1115 – 1280
4. Blacks and Whites, 1280 – 1302
5. Life in Dante's Florence, 1265–1348
6. Strikes and Riots, 1348 – 1420
7. The Rise of the House of Medici, 1420 – 39
8. Artists of the Medici, 1439 – 64
9. Father of the Country, 1455 – 64
10. Wives and Weddings, 1464 – 72 109
11. The Pazzi Conspiracy, 1478
12. Lorenzo the Magnificent, 1478 – 92
13. The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1492 – 8
14. Conspirators and Cardinals, 1498 – 1527
15. Siege and Murder, 1527 – 37
16. The Grand Duke Cosimo I, 1537 – 74
17. Pageants and Pleasures, 1560 – 1765
18. Tourists and Tuft-hunters, 1740 – 88
19. The Grand Duke Peter Leopold, 1765 – 91
20. Napoleonic Interlude, 1796 – 1827
21. Risorgimento, 1814 – 59
22. The Capital of Italy
23. ‘Ville Toute Anglaise’
24. Residents and Visitors
25. ‘Firenze Fascistissima’, 1919 – 40
26. War and Peace, 1940 – 66
27. Flood and Restoration, 1966 – 92
NOTES ON BUILDINGS AND WORKS OF ART
TABLE OF PRINCIPAL EVENTS
THE MEDICI FAMILY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We are most grateful to the authors, editors, translators and publishers of these books for the use of the extracts quoted in the following pages:
Harold Acton, The Last Medici (Methuen) and More Memoirs of an Aesthete (Hamish Hamilton); Glenn Andres, John M. Hunisan and A. Richard Turner, The Art of Florence (Cross River Press); Pietro Bargellini, La splendida storia di Firenze (Vallechi); Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (University of Chicago Press); Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James (Penguin Books); Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (Hamish Hamilton); Carlo Francovich, La Resistenza a Firenze (La Nuova Italia); Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence (Johns Hopkins University Press); Frederick Hartt, Florentine Art under Fire (Princeton University Press); ‘Lawrence H. Davison’ [D. H. Lawrence], Movements in European History (Oxford University Press); Eric Linklater, The Art of Adventure (Macmillan); Franco Nencini, Firenze: I giorni del diluvio (HarperCollins); Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters (Collins): Ugo Pesci, Firenze capitale (Bempored e Figlio); Mark Phillips, The Memoir of Marco Parenti (Heinemann); John Pope-Hennessy, Learning to Look (Heinemann); Osbert Sitwell, Great Morning (Macmillan); Giorgio Spini and Antonio Casali, Firenze (Laterza); Lina Waterfield, Castle in Italy (John Murray).
The translations of Giovanni Villani's Cronica fiorentina are by Rose E. Selfe, of Giorgio Vasari's Vite by George Bull, of J. Lucas-Dubreton's La Vie quotidienne à Florence au temps des Médicis by A. Lytton Sells, of Luca Landucci's Diario fiorentino by Alice de Rosen Jervis. The tra
nslations of Antonio Pucci's poem on the Mercato Vecchio is by Nicholas Havely, of Galeazzo Sforza's account of his meeting with Cosimo de' Medici by Rab Hatfield, and of Benozzo Gozzoli's letter to Piero de' Medici, of Boccaccio's description of the Black Death and of Giovanni Rucellai's of his son's wedding by Edward Chaney.
ILLUSTRATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Alinari, 37, 75, 87, 90, 145, 148, 151, 193, 198, 261, 263; Associated Press, 309, 311; Bridgeman Art Library, 55, 94, 119, 140, 187, 209, 231, 267, 274; Browning Collection, Mills College Library, California (on permanent loan to the Armstrong-Browning Library, Baylor University), 264; Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 211; Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 184; Magnum Photos, 312 – 13; Mansell Collection, xviii, 16 – 17, 66, 77, 80 – 81, 81, 103, 244; Mondadori, 49; National Gallery, London, 162; National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 126; National Portrait Gallery, London, 266, 282 (left); New York Public Library, 282 (right); Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 10; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 54; Royal Academy of Arts, London, 278; Scala, 3, 29, 39, 44, 45, 52, 56, 59, 62, 78, 101, 105, 117, 124, 125, 133, 142, 183, 194 – 5, 203; Wim Swaan, 72, 85, 165; Topham Picture Library, 289; Vatican Library, 11; Wallace Collection, 235.
All colour illustrations are reproduced by courtesy of Scala with the exception of (second inset) pages 4 (bottom), Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter; 5, Royal Collection, St James's © H.M. The Queen; 8 (bottom), Mary Evans Picture Library.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Although this book is intended as a well-illustrated introduction to the history of Florence and of the social life of its people from the days of the Roman Empire to those of Mussolini and the flood of 1966, I have tried at the same time to make it, in some sense, a guidebook. It cannot pretend to be a comprehensive one, but the notes at the back contain some information about the places, buildings and treasures which are mentioned in the text; and I believe that none of the principal sights and delights of Florence has been omitted. I have also attempted to describe the city as it appeared to foreign visitors and residents, generation after generation, century after century, from the time of Dante to that of the Brownings, the Trollopes and Henry James. The book will, therefore, I hope be of practical use to all those who intend one day to visit or revisit Florence, as well as providing an outline of its varied past and character sketches both of the men and women who have played their parts in its long history and of the many strangers who have come under its peculiar spell, so many of them English or American that to the Goncourt brothers it seemed in the 1850s ‘une ville toute anglaise’.
For her help in writing the notes I am most grateful to my daughter, Kate. She, assisted by my wife, by Bruce Hunter and Belinda Hollyer, has also helped me in checking these notes while we were working in Florence to ensure that the information given is as up to date as may be.
Once again I owe a particular debt of gratitude to the Hon. Edmund Howard, who has assisted me so much with my research, particularly with Italian books and articles not available in English. The translations of the quotations from these, and from his brother Hubert's account of his entry into Florence in August 1944, which originally appeared in Il Ponte, are mostly his. I am most grateful also to John Guest; to Eleo Gordon and Peter Carson of Viking; to Ursula Hibbert for having read the proofs; to Josine Meijer, who found the pictures for the book; to Esther Sidwell, who edited it; to Ursula Sieger, who drew the pictures for the Notes on Buildings, and to Reginald Piggott, who drew the maps; to Claire Smith of Harold Ober Associates and Eric Swenson of W. W. Norton, New York; and, for their help in a variety of ways, to Margaret Lewendon, Val Goodier, Alison Riley, Caroline Elam, Maria Orsini, Sophia Carducci-Loredan, Marcello Camelloni and Sir Harold Acton. As when I was working on my similar books on Rome and Venice, the staffs of the British Library, the London Library and the Italian Institute of Culture have all been unfailingly helpful. So, too, have the staffs of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence and the Museo di Firenze com' era.
Finally I must thank Jacques Braun, Derek Bond and Leo Derrick-Jehu for having read various chapters of the book and given me so much useful information; and Dr Edward Chaney, sometime research fellow in the history of architecture at Lincoln College, Oxford, former resident of Florence and co-editor of Florence: A Travellers' Companion, for having read the whole of the typescript and suggested so many improvements.
CHRISTOPHER HIBBERT
MAPS
Caption
The interior of the eleventh-century church of San Miniato al Monte. The raised choir above the crypt is approached by steps on either side of Michelozzo's tabernacle (c. 1448). Several of the capitals of the columns in the aisle were taken from Roman buildings in the city below the church.
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THE ROMAN CITY 59 BC-AD 405
‘Municipium splendidissimum.’
LUCIUS ANNAEUS FLORUS
High above Florence, on the south bank of the River Arno, stands the beautiful church of San Miniato al Monte. Hereabouts, towards the middle of the third century, were laid to rest the bones of Florence's one and only martyr. A Greek by birth, he had been decapitated, so tradition has it, during the persecutions of the Emperor Decius.
By the beginning of the eleventh century St Miniato was all but forgotten and his grave had long since been lost. But neither the decline of the martyr's reputation nor the disappearance of his remains deterred the then Bishop of Florence, Hildebrand, from choosing Miniato as the patron saint of a monastery which he had made up his mind to build on this hill overlooking Florence. So, ignoring a well-founded story that the saint's bones had been removed years ago to Metz by a relic-hunting German, the Bishop announced that they had been discovered on the very spot where the church of San Miniato al Monte still commands its magnificent panorama.1
The first abbot of the monastery adjoining the church was named Drogo. Instructed by Bishop Hildebrand to write a biography of the saint to whom his monastery was dedicated, Drogo evidently set to work with a will; but, finding the scattered references to him in ancient histories of little use in such an enterprise, he produced a splendidly romantic hagiography in the final scenes of which Miniato is presented as having his head cut off outside one of Florence's gates, and then flying with it across the Arno to place it upon the hillside where he wished it to be buried with his body.
The origins of the city of Florence itself, as recorded in its earliest histories, are no less fanciful than Abbot Drogo's biography of his patron saint; and it is largely through archaeological excavations that the outlines of the Roman town can be discerned as it came into existence at a time when the Etruscan kings were a distant memory and before its stones disappeared into the mists of the dark ages which followed the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Etruscans were a mysterious people who seem to have arrived in Europe either by sea from the Balkans or Asia Minor or overland from the north, and to have established themselves in the Po valley and along the Tyrrhenian coast in what was to become Tuscany. Known to the Greeks as Tyrrhenoi, they were experts in metalwork and in pottery as well as farmers and merchants carrying on a thriving trade with the Greek cities of southern Italy. Extending their own empire to the south, they eventually seized control of Rome. Their kings had ruled the city for almost a hundred years when, in about 507 BC, the populace rose up in arms against them and the days of the Roman Republic began.
In the years that followed, the armies of the Republic subdued the towns of Etruria one by one, including the fortified hill-town of Fiesole, which had been established above the Arno, then a broad river flowing deeply westwards to the Ligurian sea; and about 200 BC, so it used to be generally believed, the Etruscan people of Fiesole, taking advantage of the peace which the Republic had imposed upon Etruria, came down into the valley to build a town by the banks of the river. Recent discoveries, however, have suggested that Florence may not have been an Etruscan foundation, and that it may, indeed, not have come into existence before 59 BC, the year in which Julius Caesar was appo
inted consul. Certainly the provincial town which arose on the north bank of the Arno, despite its name, Florentia, ‘the flourishing town’, was neither in the days of the Roman Republic nor in those of the Empire a large or exceptionally important place.2 The gate in its eastern wall was less than half a mile from its counterpart in the west. The southern wall, a hundred paces or so from the river bank at its nearest point, roughly following the course of today's Via Porta Rossa3 and Via Condotta,4 was also less than half a mile from the northern wall which, extending along the line of Via de' Cerretani,5 just enclosed the present site of the Piazza del Duomo. The western wall ran roughly along what is now Via Tornabuoni,6 the eastern along Via del Proconsolo.7 If the Bargello had then existed it would have been outside the wall on this side; Santa Maria Novella would have been well beyond it on the other.
Yet in this small place, its streets neatly laid out at right angles to each other in the customary Roman way, there were, as in other towns of the Empire, baths and temples, a theatre, a Capitol and a Forum which occupied part of the present Piazza della Repubblica. Most of the buildings were built of brick; some had marble facings and, in imperial times, were decorated with polychrome ornamentation. There was an aqueduct some eight miles long which carried water on high arches from the abundant springs of Monte Morello; and in the Forum there was a deep well
Giorgio Vasari's Foundation of Florence, painted for the ceiling of the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo della Signoria in 1563–5.
filled with filtered water from the Arno. A bridge, which spanned the Arno where the Ponte Vecchio was to be built in the early Middle Ages, carried the Via Cassia from Rome across the river and through Florentia's southern gate; and in the suburbs, which had soon spread beyond the town's walls, there was an amphitheatre, a modest version of the Colosseum in Rome, whose arena, in which gladiators fought and wild beasts charged their tormentors, has long since disappeared beneath the pavements of the Piazza Peruzzi.8