Florence

by Christopher Hibbert

  The Palazzo Davanzati was also unusual in that several of the rooms had fireplaces, a rare convenience when the heating of rooms was more commonly entrusted to portable braziers, the smoke from which had to escape through doors or windows. By the fifteenth century, some of the Davanzati windows may well have been of glass, though it was still customary to tack sheets of oiled cotton to the window frames. The Davanzati kitchen, as was also customary, was on the top floor; above it there was a roof terrace which was replaced in the sixteenth century by the present loggia.

  As in other fourteenth-century palazzi in Florence, the walls of the principal rooms were covered with bright and charming frescoes, lively patterns and pictures of trees and plants and birds; the wooden ceilings were painted, too, and tapestries hung from hooks beneath the cornices; and, while furniture, though massive in construction, was sparse in such palaces, the painted chests known as cassoni were a pleasure to the eye in nearly every bedroom. These cassoni were often covered with paintings, the lids decorated both inside and out. Sometimes commissioned from the leading artists of the city, who undertook to supervise the carpentry and gilding as

  Painting on a chest of 1417 in the Bargello, showing horsemen taking pali – costly banners attached to poles – in procession to the Baptistery as part of the celebrations of the feast day of St John the Baptist.

  well as to do the painting, they formed an essential part of a bride's trousseau. The one provided for Caterina Strozzi on her marriage to Marco Parenti came, at a cost of 50 florins, from the workshop of Domenico Veneziano.

  Beds were also often of great value, the headboards painted or decorated with intarsia. Some were huge and canopied, twelve feet wide, big enough for four people or even more to sleep side by side, lying naked beneath linen sheets and coverlets filled with goose feathers, breathing air made sweet by scent or by herbs burning slowly in pierced globes hanging from the ceiling.

  Architects paid unusual attention to the sanitation of their buildings, ensuring that the larger houses not only had a good supply of fresh water from their own wells, but also sinks and latrines and a satisfactory drainage system, with tile piping to carry waste to cesspools and rainwater to the gutters of streets which were, so Goro Dati said, ‘paved with flat stones of equal size so that they were always clean and neat, more so than in any other place’.

  Dante condemned his countrymen and countrywomen for their ostentation, complaining of women's dresses sewn with pearls and jewels and precious stones, of their long trains, their wide sleeves which upset goblets at table, their breasts padded or exposed. But, compared with men and women of a later age, most dressed quite simply, the standard dress for all but the richest male citizens being the lucco, a dark, ankle-length gown with buttons down the front and a hood hanging down the back like a monk's cowl; hoods remained in fashion until the 1530s, when caps or hats began to take their place and the long hair of former times was cut short. Men wore pouches hanging from their belts, there being no pockets until the sixteenth century; women of high rank, so Villani said, ‘were content with a narrow skirt of plain scarlet’, while the ‘common women were dressed in plain Cambrai green’. Certainly, Villani admitted, young men were more ostentatious, with tunics growing shorter and shorter, legs displayed in highly coloured hose that went right up to the groin, codpieces boldly prominent.

  The interiors of Florentine houses were simple, too, the walls being generally whitewashed or, in the houses of the richer families, painted like those of the Palazzo Davanzati, the floors of uncovered stone; tapestries and matting, together with silverware and majolica or glass ornaments, were unpacked from chests only on special occasions. The houses in the crooked, spindly streets were generally narrow and tall, growing taller as the size of the family increased, with further rooms being built on the roof and wooden extensions containing kitchens overhanging the street. The ground floor was usually a shop or a storehouse, or was devoted to the

  Caption

  A painting by Francesco Ubertini, known as II Bachiacca, showing a Florentine street scene, c. 1530.

  A still life of game birds by Jacopo Chimenti da Empoli (1551 – 1640) in the Uffizi.

  work in which the family were engaged; above was a room, covering the same floor area, in which they slept and spent their leisure time. Those parts used occasionally as bedrooms might be separated from the living quarters by screens or curtains or partitions, but the rooms were more often undivided. In poorer homes furniture was crude and sparse, limited in most to tables, benches, stools and beds, and these frequently not owned by the family but hired from second-hand-furniture dealers.

  In winter the dark and crowded rooms were often extremely cold, the only comfort to be had coming from warming-pans or scaldini, earthenware jars filled with hot charcoal. Meals were generally quite simple, too, excessive indulgence being forbidden by sumptuary laws; and, while the richer families paid little attention to these regulations, the ordinary citizen appears to have contented himself with an evening meal of freshly baked bread complemented by such unpretentious dishes as lasagne or pasta in savore sanguino – a red sauce containing meat, wine and raisins – liver sausage with spinach or carrots, goats' milk cheese with beetroot, and, on special occasions, pinocchiato, a pudding made from pine kernels. According to Giovanni Villani, as many as 30,000 pigs were brought from the contado into the city every year, together with 70,000 sheep, 20,000 goats and 4,000 oxen and calves. This could have provided every person in Florence with over a pound and a half of meat a week; but most of the butchers' supplies went, of course, to the houses of the well-to-do.

  The Mercato Vecchio with, in the foreground, the Colonna dell'Abbondanza, which was first set up here in 1428. The old market was demolished to make way for the present Piazza della Repubblica.

  A row of shops with canopied roofs near the Ponte Santa Trinita, from a fresco of about 1560 by Giovanni Stradano in the Palazzo Vecchio.

  Food was highly seasoned, as it was elsewhere in Europe. Chicken soups and fish pies were spiced with ginger and nutmeg as well as cloves, saffron, powdered bay leaves, marjoram and parsley; strong grated cheese was sprinkled on most savoury dishes as indeed, occasionally, was sugar; savore sanguino, as well as its more usual constituents, might contain sandalwood oil and sumach, the dried leaves of a shrub now used only in tanning.

  Travellers arriving in Florence in the fourteenth century could not fail to be struck by the evident prosperity of the city: the dealers and traders hurrying in and out of the banks, the bustle of a wool industry that produced every year some 80,000 rolls of cloth worth almost a million and a quarter gold florins, the handsome coins with an image of John the Baptist on one side and a lily on the other, which, first minted a hundred years before in the city that gave them their name, had now become a common currency throughout western Europe. There was a teeming market in the Mercato Vecchio,19 in which the granite Roman column, the Colonna dell'Abbondanza, was soon to be raised above the stalls and counters.20 Here clothes dealers and cloth merchants put their wares on show beside the apothecaries and grocers, the traders in kitchenware and jugs, the money-changers, the sellers of hawks and falcons, partridges and pheasants, wild boars and goats, the market gardeners, the vendors of corn and macaroni, of dried fruit and chestnuts, of onion and garlic tarts and herbs fried in batter, and the butchers displaying the skins and heads of the animals from which the meat had just been cut. Through the crowds of dealers and buyers, hawkers made their way crying their wares, shouting above the din, while the heralds of the commune rode from one end of the market to the other calling out news and notices. Ladies were carried in litters from stall to stall, and prostitutes walked about wearing gloves in accordance with the law and with little bells on their heads.

  The city's bell-ringer and town-crier, Antonio Pucci, in one of his poems described the noise and bustle of the fourteenth-century market, ‘our chief source of life – no other square gives such delight’:

  Craftsmen and dealers o
f all sorts have stands

  Stocked with all kinds of things I'll let you know

  About, now, as this scene of ours expands.

  Sovereign remedies for all ills here below

  Can be obtained; wool and cloth dealers abound;

  Apothecaries and grocers put their wares on show;

  Traders in pots and pitchers can be found –

  As well as those who offer bed and board

  To tramps who'd otherwise doss on the ground.

  Near by stand massive vaults, where goods are stored,

  And splendid butchers' stalls, where they display

  What are the primest cuts in Florence we're assured…

  The women who sell fruit here might give some fright.

  Tough as they are, they surely know their parts

  And, just for two dried chestnuts, morning to night

  They'll bawl and brawl and call each other tarts -

  Though you'll still find as much fruit as you please

  (If it's in season) piled up on their carts.

  Other women here sell eggs and cheese

  For making vegetable flans and pies

  Or ravioli or any dish like these.

  Next to them, keeping close watch on who buys

  What, are women selling herbs and mustard-seeds

  To charm the nose or else bring water to the eyes.

  Thus women from the farms as each new day succeeds

  Bring fresh supplies in, and the good cook bears

  Home again all that the kitchen needs.

  And when the time comes for fruit to be sold at fairs

  Girls from the country pack their baskets high

  With ripe round figs and grapes, peaches and pears.

  If you try repartee with them, they won't be shy,

  And some of them, brighter than florins, shine

  With flowers from gardens that they tend near by.

  No garden, though, ever looked half as fine

  As the Mercato Vecchio does when spring is here.

  It feeds the eye and taste of every Florentine

  And in this world it can't be matched – that's clear

  To all who care to read this verse of mine

  And all who've eyes to see or ears to hear.

  In times of plague, of course, the scene in the market was far more sombre. And no plague was more devastating than that of the Black Death – perhaps bubonic plague, perhaps anthrax – which seems to have originated in the East, whence it was brought to the shores of the Black Sea by Tartar horsemen who infected Genoese traders, who, in turn, brought it to Europe. Coming to Florence in the spring of 1348, it was ‘greater here than in Pistoia and Prato, in Bologna and in the Romagna… It was a disease in which there appeared certain swellings in the groin and under the armpit and the victims spat blood and in three days they were dead… And this plague lasted until…’ Villani's narrative breaks off here as he waited until he could insert the appropriate date. He never did insert it; he himself died of the Black Death that year.

  Those who could do so fled from the city, in which the bodies of victims, to whom frightened priests had not dared administer the last rites, lay in rotting heaps awaiting burial in the summer heat. Most of those who remained in Florence joined the unnumbered dead.

  ‘The deadly pestilence did not manifest itself in the worthy city of Florence, the most noble in all Italy, as it had done in the East, where whoever started to bleed from the nose would inevitably die,’ wrote Giovanni Boccaccio ten years later in his introduction to the Decameron:

  A portrait by Andrea del Castagno of Giovanni Boccaccio, who spent his early childhood in Florence and returned to the city in 1340, writing the Decameron in the subsequent years. Detail of a fresco in the Uffizi.

  Here the deadly swellings in groin or armpit which the common people called gavociolli would spread at random to every part, the disease soon altering its quality, manifesting itself in black or bruise-like blotches which appeared on the arms and thighs, in some cases large but sparsely distributed, in others very small but frequent…

  And what made this plague even more virulent was that the afflicted had only to be in the company of the healthy for the latter to become infected in the same way, as fire consumes dry or oily substances when they are near by. Still more evil was the fact that not merely speaking to or treating the infected gave healthy people the disease or caused their death, but the mere touching of the clothes or of any other thing which had been touched by those with the disease seemed to infect one with it. It is extraordinary to hear what I have to say, so much so that if it had not been witnessed by my own and many others' eyes I would hardly believe it let alone record it in writing even if I had heard it from a trustworthy person…

  I witnessed it, as I have said, with my own eyes. I saw one day that the rags of a pauper who had died of the disease had been thrown out into the public street, where they were discovered by two pigs. As they are wont to, the pigs, first with their snouts and then with their teeth, took them and shook them against their cheeks. In no time, after rolling over as if they had been poisoned, they were dead, lying stretched out on the evil rags.

  Such things and worse provoked various fears and fantasies in those who remained alive and almost all reacted rather cruelly by fleeing in disgust from the infected and their possessions, believing they would thus preserve their own health. And there were some, who warned that a moderate lifestyle and the avoidance of every excess would give considerable protection. These formed little groups and lived apart from everyone else, enclosing themselves in houses in which there were no infected persons and, so as to live healthily and temperately, consumed the most delicate foods and best wines, avoiding every luxury and refraining from speaking with outsiders or from hearing any news of the dead or diseased and diverting themselves with music and whatever other pleasures they could conjure up. Others, taking an opposite view, that the surest medicine for so much evil was to drink heavily and enjoy things, went around singing and making merry and satisfying every appetite they could, laughing and ridiculing whatever might happen.

  By the time the last victim had been thrown into a communal grave, almost half the inhabitants of Florence had perished. The population fell to no more than 50,000; and several of the city's great families suffered so severely that their political influence was never regained.

  Although one consequence of the Black Death was a rise in wages, the years immediately following the plague were miserable ones for Florence. ‘The cost of labour and of the products of every trade and craft more than doubled in disorderly fashion,’ wrote Matteo Villani, who continued his brother's chronicle. Lawsuits were commonplace because of disputed legacies and successions. Riots broke out everywhere. Sermons at once gloomy and terrifying on the shortness of human life and the eternity of hell were preached in the churches; artists devoted themselves to scenes of suffering; flagellants paraded through the streets whipping their bare backs with knotted cords, chanting psalms as they splashed blood around them: the end of the world was near.

  Nor was all as well as it seemed in the economy of the city, even when the first evil consequences of the Black Death had been overcome.

  Thanks mainly to the gabella, an indirect tax on foodstuffs, salt and wine, and on goods passing through the city gates, the government enjoyed a healthy enough income; but a large part of this was swallowed up by an extremely expensive foreign policy directed towards the control of Tuscany and involving the maintenance of garrisons in the towns which came under Florence's control as well as a standing army of up to a thousand cavalry.

  6

  STRIKES AND RIOTS 1348 – 1420

  ‘Every vile craftsman of the city [now aspired] to reach the priorate and the great offices of the commune.’

  MATTEO VILLANI

  The man appointed to command Florence's army in 1342 was a Frenchman, Count Gauthier di Brienne, a small, clever, swarthy soldier with a straggling beard whose father had be
en lord of the Duchy of Athens, a state created by knights who had taken the cross on the Fourth Crusade. Count Gauthier accordingly styled himself Duke of Athens; and it was to him that the rich families of Florence turned when faced by a serious financial and social crisis, largely brought about by the failure of several banks, including those of the Bardi, the Peruzzi and the Acciaiuoli, whose managers had invested unwisely in foreign capitals, lending money to monarchs, including King Edward III of England, whose immensely expensive military adventures made repayment impossible.

  Persuaded to believe that a firm outsider might well resolve the crisis into which the greed of the rich had drawn them, the popolani, when called to a Parlamento in the Piazza della Signoria to confirm the Duke of Athens as the Lord of Florence for a year, cried out ‘A vita! A vita!’, ‘For life! For life!’

  As a reward for their support the Duke called upon various leaders of the popolani to take up office as priori. Yet, while this naturally enraged the rich, who had come to regard these appointments as exclusively their own, it did not long placate the popolani, who turned against the dictator as soon as it became clear that he was quite incapable of bringing the city, which he was taxing mercilessly, out of its deep depression. Surrounded by enemies of all classes, the Duke withdrew with some four hundred troops into the Palazzo della Signoria (then known as the Palazzo del Popolo) which, as with several other public buildings in Florence, he had plastered with his coat of arms. ‘Every citizen was armed,’ Villani recorded. ‘All were out in the streets, either mounted or on foot. They gathered in their respective neighbourhoods, bringing out their flags and shouting, “Death to the Duke and his men! Long live the people! Long live the Commune and liberty!” ’ To placate an angry mob howling for blood beneath the windows of the Palazzo, the Duke ordered his soldiers to release various prisoners he had held in custody without trial and to push out with them the man he had appointed his chief of police, together with this detested man's young son. The mob then ‘dismembered the son in the presence of his father, cutting him into little pieces, and after this they did the same to his father. And one of them speared a bit of flesh on to a lance and another stuck a bit on to his sword, and in this manner they made the rounds of the city. Some of them were so cruel and possessed of such bestial fury that they ate the raw flesh.’ Their thirst for blood thus temporarily satisfied, the mob allowed the Duke and his other officials to escape from Florence.