Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  The Ponte Carraia fell with the exception of two arches. And immediately after, the Trinita bridge except for one pier and one arch… It was now the turn of the Ponte Vecchio. When it was choked by the boughs of the fallen trees brought down by the Arno, the water surged over the arches and, rushing upon the shops on the bridge, swept everything away except the two central

  Scenes of Florentine life in the middle of the fourteenth century as depicted in frescoes by Andrea di Bonaiuto and his pupils in the Spanish Chapel at Santa Maria Novella.

  piers. And at the Rubaconte bridge [the Ponte alle Grazie] the water rushed over the top and destroyed the parapet in several places… To look at this scene was to stare at chaos.

  Three hundred people lost their lives and incalculable damage was done to buildings and stores. Yet even so, the devastation was not so appalling as that caused by the fires that swept through the city, most of whose buildings were still constructed wholly or largely of wood. Fires are, indeed, regular incidents in Villani's chronicle. In the course of a single year, 1331, he recorded a fierce fire on the Ponte Vecchio, which destroyed all its shops ‘with heavy loss to many craftsmen, and two apprentices perished’; an even worse conflagration near the church of Santa Trinita ‘in certain lowly structures housing some carpenters and a blacksmith whereby six persons perished’; and a fire which attacked the Palazzo del Podestà ‘and burned the roof of the old building… on which account the government ordered rebuilding in stone all the way to the roof’.

  Some years before, an

  accursed fire fanned by a strong north wind… burned the houses of the Abati and of the Macci; of the Amieri and Toschi… the Lamberti and Bachini… and the whole street of Calimala. And then, attacking the houses of the Cavalcanti, it travelled round the Mercato Nuovo and consumed the church of Santa Maria as far as the Ponte Vecchio… In fact, it destroyed much of the city of Florence, consuming a total of 1, 700 palaces, towers and houses. The loss in furniture, possessions and goods of every kind was incalculable… And what was not burned in the fire was carried off by robbers.

  To avoid such losses, Paolo da Certaldo recommended that every householder should make sure his property was well supplied with sacks so that he could carry away his possessions when fire threatened them and with ropes so that he and his family could make their own way to safety.

  Tragedy was likely to strike on the happiest occasions, particularly on May Day, when the celebrations drew large crowds into the small squares and narrow streets. One May Day at the beginning of the century the authorities responsible for public spectacles decided to have a representation of hell on the banks of the Arno and on the surface of the river itself. The city's crier went about the streets announcing the forthcoming event and inviting all who wanted to have ‘news of the nether world’ to go down to the Arno by the Ponte Carraia. ‘And on barges and boats moored in the Arno.’ so Villani recorded,

  they erected platforms and upon them represented hell with its fires and punishments and sufferings. There were men in the likeness of demons horrible to see, and others acting the part of naked souls. The demons tortured their victims in the most terrible ways amidst a cacophony of shrieks and cries, terrible to hear. And so many people crowded together to view the spectacle that the Ponte Carraia, [at that time] constructed of wooden planks laid from pier to pier, became so overloaded that it broke in several places and crashed into the river with its load. Thus many people were injured and many others were drowned, so play turned to earnest and just as the public crier had announced, many indeed went to get news of the other world, with great lamentation and sorrow to all the city.

  While rich and poor alike had to face the possibility of a violent death, it was the poor alone who suffered in times of scarcity when the dealers in the corn market – evading the regulations of the Sei della Biada, the Six of Commerce – contrived to profit from the problems caused by the rapidly increasing population.

  The grain market was held in the piazza outside the building known as Orsanmichele. This had been constructed on the site of the ninth-century oratory of San Michele in Orto, St Michael in the Garden, which had been destroyed in 1239.3 Under its roofed loggia, where the standard prices of grain were marked up on boards, moneylenders and money-changers could be found as well as grain merchants; and, in times of famine, as a warning to any customers who felt disposed to attack the merchants or the officials of the Sei della Biada, guards with axes stood beside an executioner's block.

  Here also, until largely destroyed by fire, there had once been a Madonna painted in fresco on one of the pillars of the loggia, an image believed to have miraculous properties and consequently surrounded by burning tapers and entrusted to the watchful care of the Confraternity of the Laudesi.4 When orders were given for the reconstruction of the loggia, with two floors above it for the storage of grain, the Florentine painter, Bernardo Daddi, was commissioned to portray a new Madonna and so highly was his picture regarded that one of the city's leading artists, Andrea di Cione, nicknamed Orcagna (local slang for archangel), painter and architect as well as sculptor, was approached to create for it the magnificent tabernacle which is there today.5 This in its turn was considered far too fine to be kept in a mere grain market; so the market was moved elsewhere; the spaces between the pillars of the open loggia were walled up and Orsanmichele was dedicated as a church.

  The ill-nourished beggars who were usually to be found wandering about the Orsanmichele were, so Villani said, the first to fall victim to the outbreaks of plague which visited Florence at frequent intervals, as it did all other overcrowded medieval cities with a contaminated water supply, the most primitive methods of sewerage and drainage, and a population perfectly content to throw their household rubbish into the street to be pushed about and snuffled over by scavenging animals; and for want of the privies and cesspools of the rich men's palaces, people would make use of the ditches by the city walls or the ruins of some convenient tower. The epidemics which plagued Florence were evidently on occasion of a peculiarly virulent kind: the word influenza, not known in English until 1743, was being used in Florence in Villani's time.

  In describing one ‘great pestilence’, that of 1340, Villani estimated that a sixth of the citizens of Florence, that was to say about 15,000 people, perished,

  wherefore the city was full of grief and lamentation and people attended to scarcely anything other than the burying of the dead… And on account of this great pestilence the bishop and the clergy advised the holding of a great procession. This took place on 18 June and almost the whole body of citizens, men and women, followed the relics of the body of Christ, which are preserved at Sant‘Ambrogio,6 and marched through the city till nones [3 o'clock in the afternoon] carrying more than 150 lighted candles as large as torches.

  Despite plague and famine, fire and flood, throughout Villani's lifetime and for the rest of the century, the appearance of Florence was gradually being transformed. In his father's day there were few public buildings of stone and those were of little architectural merit. But as Villani himself grew to manhood there began to appear in the city those great edifices which were to help give it its distinction, buildings lay and ecclesiastical, palaces for guilds and political parties such as the Palazzo dell'Arte della Lana and the Palazzo di Parte Guelfa, and family palaces like the Palazzo degli Acciaiuoli.7

  In 1296 work had begun on a new cathedral church, probably under the direction of Arnolfo di Cambio, not a native of Florence but a sculptor and architect who had worked in Siena, Rome and Orvieto. He then settled in Florence to undertake his most important commission, which he was instructed to carry out ‘with the greatest lavishness and magnificence possible’.

  The foundation stone was laid with much solemnity on the day of St Mary [8 September] by the Cardinal Legate of the Pope and many bishops. And there were present also the Podestà and the Capitano del Popolo and the priori and all the officials of Florence. And the church was consecrated to the honour of God and
Saint Mary and given the name of Santa Maria del Fiore, although the people continued to call it by its former name of Santa Reparata.8

  Some years later a new campanile was started ‘close to the front of the church on the piazza of San Giovanni… and as superintendent of the works,’ Villani wrote with pride, ‘the commune appointed our fellow citizen, Giotto, the most sovereign master of painting of our time, who drew all his figures and their postures according to nature. And he was given a salary by the commune in virtue of his talents and excellence.’9

  Appointed capomaestro of all the cathedral works in 1334, Giotto di Bondone, who was born at Vespignano near Florence, is believed to have been a pupil of Cenni de Peppe, commonly known as Cimabue, the mosaicist and painter who, as Dante said, held the field in painting until Giotto had ‘the cry, and then the fame of Cimabue [was] obscured’. Like Cimabue, Giotto endeavoured to break free from the stylized traditions of medieval art, to revive classical ideals and naturalism, to abandon the bright colours and strong lines of Byzantine and Sienese painting and adopt a more realistic and human approach. Indeed, the sixteenth-century author of Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Painters, Sculptors and Architects, Giorgio Vasari, gives Giotto, ‘the son of a poor peasant farmer’, credit for originating ‘the good modern manner’.

  A most even-tempered man, in striking contrast to the architect who was later to crown the cathedral with its great dome, Giotto was also

  very sharp-witted and light-hearted, always ready with a witty remark, as is well remembered in Florence. Apart from what Giovanni Boccaccio wrote, Franco Sacchetti records many of Giotto's best sayings… There is a story that when he was still a young man in Cimabue's workshop, he painted on the nose of one of the figures Cimabue had executed a fly that was so lifelike that when Cimabue returned to carry on with his work he tried several times to brush it off with his hand.

  Some years before Giotto's appointment as capomaestro of the cathedral works, building had begun – about 400 yards south towards the river – on an imposing palace for the priori. The site chosen was close by the ruins of the houses of the disgraced family of the Uberti,

  rebels of Florence and Ghibellines. And the ground whereon the houses had stood was converted into a public piazza [the Piazza della Signoria] to make sure that the houses would never be rebuilt.10 And the commune bought the houses of other citizens as, for instance, those of the Foraboschi, and raised the new palace on the purchased ground. And for the tower of the palace of the priors they used the tower of the palace of the Foraboschi, which was almost one hundred feet high and was called La Vacca. And, so that the palace was not built on land formerly belonging to the Uberti, the committee responsible had it built askew, which was a great imperfection, inasmuch as the palace should have been given a square or rectangular shape and should not have been carried so close to the church of San Pier Scheraggio.11

  Opposite this church, which had to be demolished in the sixteenth century for the building of the Uffizi, there appeared, after Villani's death, a covered loggia for the reception of ambassadors and the presentation of priori for formal election, ceremonies which had previously taken place in the open on a platform, or ringhiera, erected in front of the palace. Built on the site of several small houses pulled down for the purpose, this loggia, the Loggia dei Priori, was later to be used as a guardhouse for the Landsknechte, the Swiss mercenaries of the Grand Dukes of Tuscany, known in Florence as Lanzi. It survives as an open-air sculpture gallery, the Loggia dei Lanzi.12

  By the time this loggia was completed, several of Florence's older buildings had been transformed. The church of Santa Croce had been largely rebuilt; so had Santa Maria Novella, by Dominican monks trained as architects. The Umiliati had moved into the convent beside the church of Ognissanti,13 the Servites, an order founded by seven rich Florentines who had devoted themselves to the service of the Blessed Virgin, into the convent of Santissima Annunziata,14 and the Carmelites, the severe order known as Whitefriars, into Santa Maria del Carmine.15 The church of the Badia had been restored; and, although this was completely reconstructed yet again in the seventeenth century, the campanile of the 1330s was spared. In the Baptistery the last of the magnificent mosaics, some by Florentines, some by a master mosaicist from Venice, had been finished, in about 1300, when Andrea Pisano, a sculptor from Pontedera, who was to succeed Giotto as capomaestro of the Campanile, was commissioned by the rich Arte di Calimala to provide wax models from which the bronze doors for the south side of the Baptistery might be cast.16

  Since the floods of 1333 the bridges across the Arno had all been repaired or rebuilt, with the exception of the Ponte alle Grazie, which, although

  A detail from the Pianta della Catena, a woodcut from c. 1490, giving the earliest view of Florence, and showing the four bridges, the Ponte alle Grazie, Ponte Vecchio, Ponte Santa Trinita and the Ponte alla Carraia, which linked the two areas of the city. The woodcut is attributed to Francesco Rosselli.

  upstream from the others, had survived. The new Ponte Vecchio, completed in 1345, had been rebuilt in stone a good eight feet wider than its predecessor, with forty-three shops, each sixteen feet square.

  Precise as Villani was in describing the measurements of the Ponte Vecchio, he was even more so when he came to write about the city's walls. These, he assured his readers, were some five miles long, nearly six feet thick and forty feet high to the top of the battlements, enclosing large areas of gardens and orchards to allow for an increase in the size of the city. There were fifteen gates and seventy-two towers at regular intervals, overlooking a deep and insanitary moat.17

  Within this wall, Villani continued with his passion for statistics, there were, in 1328, 90,000 people; and the population was growing year by year, reaching perhaps 100,000 in 1338, the birth of boys slightly outnumbering that of girls according to the officials who examined the beans which were dropped into a box, a black bean for a male child, a white bean for a female. According to Villani's calculations, in the 1320s, about 1,500 people were foreigners, traders, pilgrims and travellers, some 10,000 were children in elementary schools, and 600 were boys under instruction in Latin, mathematics, logic and dialectics. There were 600 notaries, 60 physicians and surgeons, 100 apothecaries, 80 banking houses and firms of moneylenders large and small. There were 146 bakers and confectioners and a very large though uncertain number of men in the dyeing, building and clothing trades, 30,000 of them working in 200 wool workshops. There were also many slaves, the importation of which had been authorized in 1336 after an outbreak of plague had severely reduced the numbers of native servants. These slaves, many of them young girls under twelve years of age bought cheaply in the markets of Genoa and Naples, were for the most part Greeks, Russians, Turks, Circassians or Tartars. The Tartars were said to be the most conscientious workers, but the Circassians better natured and better looking, many of these becoming pregnant by their masters and having to take bundles of swarthy babies to the doors of the city's foundling hospitals. Considered as chattels to be worked at full stretch so that they did not ‘waste time leaning out of the window’, slaves were at the mercy of their owners, who could in theory ‘hold, sell, alienate, exchange, enjoy, dispose of by will and do with in perpetuity whatsoever' they liked with them. They were punished cruelly for their misdemeanours. In 1379 a female slave who had put nitrate of silver into an enema which she had administered to her master was tortured in public with red-hot pincers before being burned alive. Yet obedient and docile slaves were generally well treated and in time became accepted as members of their masters' families. They were nearly all freed before their death and were usually given a pension.

  Continuing his survey of Florence, Villani noted there were 30 hospitals with 1,000 beds in all, 110 churches, 57 of them parish churches, the rest belonging to religious houses, as well as innumerable fine private houses upon which their owners spent ‘a sinful’ amount of money. The Palazzo Davanzati was a characteristic example.18 This tall house in the Via Porta
Rossa was built towards the middle of the fourteenth century by the Davizzi family, passing in the sixteenth to the Davanzati, the old merchant family of Bernardo di Antonfrancesco Davanzati, historian and translator of Tacitus, whose large, elaborate coat of arms decorates a façade otherwise unremarkable, except for the long poles supported on brackets between the windows, upon which were hung birdcages, festive banners and, more prosaically, washing. There are also hooks for awnings to protect the principal rooms from the hot summer sun.

  At ground-floor level is a large vaulted entrance-hall which was once an open loggia and was used for family gatherings and later as shops. Behind this is an interior courtyard which could be cut off from the street in times of trouble, when water could be obtained from the deep well sunk beneath the floor in the courtyard and provisions from storerooms which were replenished as necessary through doors leading to the narrow streets at the back. Intruders in the entrance-hall were in danger of having blocks of stone thrown on their heads through holes in the floor of the room above. A staircase leads up to galleries on three upper floors, each of which has one large room at the front with a few, a very few, smaller rooms at the back. Few as these smaller rooms, mostly bedrooms, are, however, the Palazzo Davanzati was a comparatively grand house at a time when a house with ten rooms was considered palatial, when families lived in a communal way, sharing accommodation in a manner which later generations would deem distressing.