History

Tuscan Roots: from Prehistory to the Etruscans (9th C. B.C. - 3rd C. B.C.)

Although Neanderthals, ancient Homo sapiens, and Paleolithic and Bronze Age humans left some of their bones and tools lying about, and the 9th-century-B.C. Villanovan Iron Age culture (possibly immigrants from the north) has helped fill museums with pot shards, things really didn't start getting lively in central Italy until the Etruscans rose to power.

The most widely accepted theory is that the Etruscans came from modern-day Turkey in Asia Minor -- at least, that's what the ancient Romans believed -- and arrived in central Italy in the late 9th or early 8th century B.C. The fact that their language isn't Indo-European but appears similar to some Aegean dialects helps confirm this theory, but there are others who now feel the Etruscans may have risen from native peoples in central Italy, perhaps a combination of the Villanovans, local tribes, and travelers from Asia Minor. Whatever the case, these Etruschi or Tuschi formed the basic cultural/political force in the region that's now named for them, Tuscany.

Much of what little remains to tell us of the Etruscans -- that which hasn't been corrupted by later Roman influence -- consists of tombs and their contents, and it's difficult to reconstruct an entire culture simply by looking at its graveyards. Etruscan society may have been more egalitarian than later Western cultures, or at least women appear to have had more of an active role and a higher status in daily life. Historians say they loved to throw parties, have banquets, go on the hunt, and the like -- but that may just be what they chose to celebrate in the few paintings and many carvings they left us. While we can read their language, what script we have goes into little beyond death, divination, and the divine.

What historians are surer of is that Etruscans became enamored of the Attic culture of Greece and adopted many of the Greek gods and myths, as well as many Greek vases, in the 6th century B.C. This era coincided with the height of their considerable power. In fact, from the late 7th century until 510 B.C., Rome was ruled by Etruscan kings of the Tarquin dynasty. Although the Etruscan empire spread south almost to Naples, east to the Adriatic, and west onto Corsica, the heart and core called Etruria covered an area from the Arno east to the Apennines and south to the Tiber, encompassing most of Tuscany, half of Umbria, and northern Lazio.

The Etruscans surrounded their cities with massive defensive walls, were adept bridge builders, and developed sophisticated canal, sewer, and irrigation systems for their cities and fields, draining marshy lands for farming and sinking wells and cisterns and carving plumbing systems in the rock beneath their cities. (The famous Roman plumbing network was started by the Etruscan kings of Rome.)

Well before this time, around 1200 B.C., Indo-European Italic peoples had wandered into Italy from the north. The Samnites and Latins continued south, but the Umbri tribes decided to settle in the Apennines and valleys east of the Tiber, which flows through the middle of modern-day Umbria. Their loosely defined zone of cultural hegemony encompassed what is now northern and eastern Umbria and the Marches over to the sea, as well as corners of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. (Modern city descendants include Gubbio and Città di Castello, as well as Assisi and Todi, both of which later became Etruscan and then Roman.) All we really know about the Umbri is they had a highly developed religion based on reading prophecies in animal sacrifices and the flights of birds -- Gubbio's famous Eugubine Tables bronze plaques tell us this much. When the Roman influence spread north in the 3rd century B.C., the Umbrian cities for the most part allied themselves to the Latins, were awarded Roman citizenship early, and enjoyed a large degree of autonomy from authorities in Rome. Aside from the usual city rivalries and moderate clashes between expanding empires, the Umbrians appear to have lived more or less amicably with their Etruscan neighbors.

Looking for Etruscan Remains -- If you want to check out some Etruscan remains, head to the following towns: Volterra (a museum, a city gate, and walls), Chiusi (underground aqueducts to tour and many tombs in the area), Arezzo (a museum), Cortona (a museum and tombs), Perugia (a city gate and a well), and Orvieto (tombs, museums, underground tunnels to tour, and a well). There are also major Tuscan finds collected at the archaeological museum in Florence.

Enter the Romans: the Founding of Florence (3rd C. B.C. - 5th C. A.D.)

In the 3rd century B.C., that Latin city on the Tiber called Rome began its expansion, and some of the first neighboring peoples to fall were the Etruscans. Some cities, such as Perugia and Arezzo, allied themselves with Rome and were merely absorbed, while others, including Volterra and Orvieto, were conquered outright. The Romans brought with them the combination of a highly conservative (some say stagnant) culture coupled with a certain degree of adaptability to local religious beliefs and social modes that allowed their empire to stay solvent for so long. As the Romans gained power over the entire peninsula, the removal of political barriers and the construction of roads allowed trade to develop and flow relatively uninhibited.

Many of the old cities flourished, and the general prosperity led to the founding of new cities throughout the region, especially as retirement camps for Roman soldiers. While the Etruscans were keen on building cities on hilltops -- both for easy defensibility and to leave more valley land free for farming -- the Romans preferred flat ground along rivers, which allowed them to lay out exacting street-plan grids oriented precisely to the points of the compass. They were fanatically single-minded about city planning, rarely wavering from this model.

During the lull of the later Roman Empire, Christianity quickly spread throughout much of central Italy -- Lucca even claims to have converted in the 1st century A.D. through the efforts of one of St. Peter's own followers, though Pisa tries to one-up its neighbors by claiming a church first built by St. Peter.

Goths, Lombards & Franks: the Dark Ages (6th C.-9th C.)

As the Roman Empire collapsed in the 5th century A.D., Germanic tribes swept down from the north and wreaked mayhem on central Italian cities as group after group fought their way down to Rome in a sacking free-for-all, pillaging all the way south and often on the way back north as well. The Goths swept down in the 6th century A.D., and one of their leaders, Totila, conquered Florence in A.D. 552.

Perhaps the strongest force in the Dark Ages was the Lombards who established two major duchies in central Italy, one based at Lucca, which governed most of Tuscany, and the other at Spoleto, which took care of most of Umbria. When their ambitions threatened Rome (now a church stronghold) in the 8th century, the pope invited the Frankish king Pepin the Short to come clear the Lombards out. Under Pepin, and, more important, his son Charlemagne, the Lombards were ousted from Tuscany and Umbria.

The Lombard duchy at Lucca was merely replaced by a Frankish margrave, with Tuscany ruled by powerful figures like the Margrave Matilda. Charlemagne gave the lands he took from the duchy of Spoleto directly to the pope, but the pontiffs gradually lost control over the region as they busied themselves with other concerns.

With the breakup of Charlemagne's empire in the 9th century, the German emperors started pressing claims over the Italian peninsula. The thorny question of who should wield temporal power, the pope in Rome or the German emperor, embroiled European politics on the larger scale for several centuries. (The effects of this struggle on Tuscany and Umbria are discussed under "Guelphs & Ghibellines: A Medieval Mess," below.) On the smaller scale, central Italy was plunged into political chaos out of which emerged for the first time the independent city-state republic known as the comune.

The Medieval Comune: An Imperfect Democracy

In the late 11th century, merchants became wealthier and more important to the daily economic life of the small Italian cities, just as the old landed aristocracy was becoming obsolete with the collapse of the feudal system. Many of these merchants were minor gentry who began to get involved in trade and in big business like the textile industry and banking. They organized themselves into guilds and gradually became the bourgeois oligarchic leaders of the cities. The self-governing comuni they established weren't the perfect democracies they've often been made out to be. While many were ruled by popularly elected councils, usually only the guild members of the middle class were enfranchised. The majority of city laborers, as well as the rural farmers, remained powerless.

As the comuni stabilized their infrastructures -- after dealing with blows like the 1348 Black Death, a plague that swept through Europe and left well over half of central Italy's population dead -- they also set about roughing up their neighbors and traditional rivals. Battles were fought both to increase the city-states' trading power and to acquire more towns under their control (or at least secure subservient allies). To this end, instead of raising militia armies, they hired condottieri, professional soldiers of fortune who controlled forces of armed mercenaries. These soldiers came from all over and from all walks of life.

Many of these trade wars and ancient rivalries were fought between cities that used Europe's big power struggle of the age -- the Holy Roman Emperor versus the Pope -- as an excuse to attack their traditional antagonists. Although in the end the terms Guelph and Ghibelline meant little to the parties involved (even if they did have overriding and longer-term effects on the towns that defined themselves as one or the other), the conflict between these factions comes up constantly in medieval Tuscany and Umbria, so the history behind it bears a brief overview.

Guelph & Ghibellines: A Medieval Mess

At this time in Europe, two entities competed for absolute power over the continent, the emperor and the pope, who used the argument over who got to appoint parish priests as an excuse to vie for control of Europe. The terms that came to describe Italian supporters of the emperor and Italian supporters of the pope actually stemmed from a German conflict over imperial succession.

In the 12th century, the German throne of the Holy Roman Emperor sat empty. Otto IV's family, the Welf dynasty of Bavaria, fought for it against the lords of Waiblingen, where the house of Swabia ruled under the Hohenstaufen dynasty. The names were corrupted in Italian to Guelph and Ghibelline, respectively, and when the Hohenstaufens came out winners with Frederick Barbarossa being crowned emperor, the Ghibellines stuck as the supporters of the emperor while the Guelphs became the party that backed the pope.

In Italy, the issue was all about who got to be in charge: the old nobility, who as Ghibellines favored the imperial promise of a return to feudalism and hence their own power, or the Guelph merchant-and-banking middle class, who supported the pope and his free-trade attitudes. While these terms did mean something regarding which faction, nobles or merchants, controlled any one city, they were used mainly to define one city in terms of its opposition to rival cities. So if your rivals were Ghibelline, you'd go Guelph, and if they turned Guelph for some reason, you usually swung around to Ghibelline pretty quickly. Although they all flip-flopped to some degree, Florence (plus Lucca, Arezzo, and Perugia) turned out Guelph, which made rivals Pisa, Pistoia, and Siena Ghibelline.

The Guelph-Ghibelline conflict not only spawned intercity warfare but also sparked intracity strife between rival factions. The most famous intracity conflict occurred in Florence in the 13th century, when powerful warring clans each took up arms and called in alliances, and the city split into Guelph and Ghibelline parties, under which names the parties waged a decades-long struggle over who'd control the city government. In Florence, when the Guelphs finally won in the late 13th century, they further divided into two factions, the Blacks (Guelphs) and the Whites (Ghibellines, but only because they hated Pope Boniface VIII). When the Blacks came out on top, they exiled the Whites, among whom was a Florentine White Guelph ambassador named Dante who lived the rest of his life in exile, perfecting his poetry.

At the turn of the 14th century, when the Black Guelphs finally came out victorious, Florence began to enjoy a fairly stable republican rule -- still of the old assembly system called now the Signoria, a ruling council elected from the major guilds. Florence slowly expanded its power, first allying with Prato, then conquering Pistoia, and by 1406 adding Volterra, Arezzo, and Pisa to the cities under its rule.

As the major guilds accrued more and more power, and the top merchants seized control of Florence, the minor guilds and lesser merchants looked to one of the few renegade merchant families sympathetic to their plight. It was an upstart family that, with a bit of luck, had recently risen from virtual anonymity to become one of the most successful banking houses in the city. It was a clan without a particularly distinguished pedigree, a fact that kept them from being fully accepted by the major guild leaders who came from old Florentine families. They called themselves the Medici.

Guelph or Ghibelline? -- Though it's admittedly not the perfect measure, you can sometimes tell which a city was, at least at any given time, by looking at the battlements of the medieval town hall: The Guelphs favored squared-off crenellations and the Ghibellines swallowtail ones.

Exceptions to this are Siena's Palazzo Pubblico, which was built with blocky battlements during the briefly Guelph period of the Council of Nine, and Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, which confusingly sports both kinds.

The Renaissance: Cue the Medici

The Medici came from the hills of the Mugello in the early Middle Ages, quite possibly charcoal burners looking for the good life of the city. The family found moderate success and even had a few members elected to public office in the comune government.

At the turn of the 15th century, Giovanni de' Bicci de' Medici made the family fortune through a series of shrewd moves establishing the Medici as bankers to the papal curia in Rome. His son, Cosimo de' Medici, called Cosimo il Vecchio, orchestrated a number of important alliances and treaties for the Florentine Signoria, gaining him prestige and respect. He was a humanist leader who believed in the power of the emerging new art forms of the early Renaissance, and he commissioned works from the greatest painters, sculptors, and architects of the day.

Cosimo grew so attached to the sculptor Donatello that, as Cosimo lay dying, he made sure his son, Piero the Gouty, promised to care for the also aging artist and to see that he never lacked for work. Cosimo, as a properly modest ruler, was so beloved by the people that they buried him under the inscription pater patirae (father of the homeland). Piero's rule was short and relatively undistinguished, quickly superseded by the brilliant career of his son, Lorenzo de' Medici, called Lorenzo the Magnificent.

Under the late-15th-century rule of Lorenzo, Florence entered its golden era, during which time it became Europe's cultural and artistic focal point. It was Lorenzo who encouraged the young Michelangelo to sculpt, and he and Medici cousins commissioned paintings from Botticelli and poetry from Poliziano. Lorenzo founded a Platonic academy to further the study of the classical world and was himself an accomplished poet.

Although Lorenzo fought to maintain the precious balance of power between Italian city-states, in doing so he incurred the wrath of the pope and the Pazzi family, Florentine rivals of the Medici. The young Medici leader's troubles came to a head in the infamous 1478 Pazzi Conspiracy, in which Lorenzo and his brother were attacked during High Mass. The coup failed, and the Pazzi were expelled from the city, which in the end helped solidify Medici power over Florence. Lorenzo, however, was less adept than his grandfather at managing the family bank (losing the papal account had something to do with it, along with well-meaning mismanagement by assistants). His son and successor, Piero de' Medici, was almost immediately forced to flee the invading armies of Charles VIII in 1494 (although Charles quickly withdrew from the Italian field).

Into the power vacuum stepped puritanical preacher Girolamo Savonarola. This theocrat's apocalyptic visions and book-burning (the original Bonfire of the Vanities) held the public's fancy for about 4 years, until the pope excommunicated the entire city for following him, and the Florentines called it quits, putting the torch to Savonarola as a heretic.

A free republic took Savonarola's place, happily governing itself and commissioning artworks from the likes of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and placing Machiavelli in charge of organizing a citizen's militia. In 1512, however, papal armies set another of Lorenzo's sons, the boring young Giuliano de' Medici, duke of Nemours, on the vacant Medici throne. Giuliano, and later Lorenzo de' Medici (Lorenzo the Magnificent's grandson via the ousted Piero) were merely mouthpieces for the real brains of the family, Giuliano's brother, Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, who in 1513 became Pope Leo X and uttered the immortal words "God has given us the papacy, now let us enjoy it."

Pope Leo's successor as leader of the Medici was his natural cousin, Giulio de' Medici, illegitimate son of Lorenzo's brother Giuliano. Although blackguards such as Ippolito and Alessandro de' Medici held sway in Florence, they really took their orders from Giulio, who from 1523 to 1534 continued to run the family from Rome as Pope Clement VII.

Charles V's imperial armies sacked Rome in 1527, sending Clement VII scurrying to Orvieto for safety and giving the Florentines the excuse to boot Alessandro from town and set up a republican government again. In 1530, however, the pope and Charles reconciled and sent a combined army to lay siege to Florence, which hired Michelangelo to design part of the defenses, and eventually Alessandro was reinstated. This time he had an official title: Duke of Florence.

After decadently amusing himself as a tyrant in Florence for 7 years, during which time Clement VII died and Alessandro inherited full power, Alessandro was murdered in bed while awaiting what he thought was a secret tryst with a virtuous woman but in reality was a setup by his distant cousin Lorenzaccio de' Medici, who plunged a dagger into the duke's belly and fled to Venice (where he was later assassinated).

The man chosen to take Alessandro's place was a Medici of a different branch, a descendant of Cosimo il Vecchio's brother and the son of the virtuous and valorous warrior, Giovanni delle Bande Nere. All the hidden powers of Florence thought young Cosimo de' Medici would be easily controlled when they named him duke of Florence. They were wrong.

Contrary to his immediate Medici predecessors, Cosimo I actually devoted himself to attending to matters of state. He built up a navy, created a seaport for Florence called Livorno, ruled firmly but judiciously (he never was very popular, though), and even conquered age-old rival Siena after a brutal war from 1555 to 1557. His greatest personal moment came in 1569 when his -- and through him, Florence's -- authority over Tuscany was recognized by the pope, who declared him Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Except for the tiny Republic of Lucca, which happily trundled along independently until Napoleon gave it to his sister in 1806, the history of Tuscany was now firmly intertwined with that of Florence, and soon, the rest of Italy.

The Dignity of the Last Medici Grand Duke -- Grand Duke Gian Gastone barely showed his face outside the Pitti Palace -- except on one memorable carriage ride through town to prove he was alive, during which he occupied himself by vomiting out the window.

The Risorgimento: Italy Becomes a Country (late 19th C.)

The Savoy kings of the northwestern Italian region of Piedmont decided to create a kingdom of Italy in the late 1800s. In 1859, the last Lorraine grand duke, Leopold II, abdicated and in 1860, Florence and Tuscany became part of the newly declared Italian state. From 1865 to 1870, Florence was the capital of Italy, and it enjoyed a frenzied building boom -- the medieval walls were torn down and the Jewish ghetto demolished and replaced with the cafe-lined Piazza della Repubblica, and the city quickly gentrified.

The army that was conquering recalcitrant states on the peninsula for Vittorio Emanuele II, first king of Italy, was commanded by Gen. Giuseppe Garibaldi, who spent much of the end of the war slowly subjugating the papal states -- the pope was the last holdout against the new regime. This meant defeating the papal authorities in Umbria, whose armies, however, quickly retreated, leaving cities like Perugia to cheer on Garibaldi's troops as they freed the region from hundreds of years of papal oppression.

Fascism: Getting Roped into World War II

The demagogue Benito Mussolini came to power after World War I and did much to improve Italy's infrastructure -- at least on the surface -- and in the process won the respect of many Italians. His Fascist regime accomplished the improbable: drumming up national sentiment in a country where most people, far from normally feeling any sort of patriotism, still looked on the folk in the village 5km (3 miles) down the road as foreigners. Then Mussolini got caught up with Hitler's World War II egomania, believing that Italy should have a second empire as great as the ancient Roman one.

Although the Tuscans certainly had their share of collaborators and die-hard Fascists, many Italians never bought into the war or the Axis alliance. Partisan movement was always strong, with resistance fighters holed up, especially in the hills south of Siena. Tuscany became a battlefield as the occupying Nazi troops slowly withdrew across the landscape in the face of American and Allied advancement.

Postwar Tuscany & Umbria

Florence was hit with disaster when a massive flooding of the Arno in 1966 covered much of the city with up to 6m (20 ft.) of sludge and water, destroying or severely damaging countless thousands of works of art and literature (8,000 paintings in the Uffizi basement alone, and 1.5 million volumes in the National Library). Along with an army of experts and trained restorers, hundreds of volunteers nicknamed "Mud Angels" descended on the city, many of them foreign students, to pitch in and help dig out all the mud and salvage what they could of one of the greatest artistic heritages of any city on earth.

The fortunes of Tuscany and Umbria have in the past 60 years mainly followed those of Italy at large. After the multiple dissolutions of parliament and resignations of prime ministers amid rampant scandal from 1993 to 1996, Romano Prodi and the center-left Olive Tree coalition managed to hold power for more than 3 years -- a record of sorts in Italy, which since World War II had averaged a new government every 9 months. The Prodi government eased nicely into the similarly left-leaning coalition headed by Prime Minster Massimo D'Alema. But local elections began swinging back to the right of center, and in 2001, media magnate (and the world's 29th richest man) Silvio Berlusconi -- briefly prime minister in 1993 but brought down by professional and political scandals -- gained control once again of the Italian government as part of a center-right coalition including the neo-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale party and the anti-immigrant Lega del Nord. Prodi returned to the fore in 2006, defeating Berlusconi by the slimmest of margins and with a very shaky coalition. His triumphant return was short-lived. Berlusconi, also known as The Knight, came galloping back to power in the elections of 2008. The scandals surrounding the 74-year-old's business dealings and conflicts of interest gave way to scandals surrounding his private life, in particular, a penchant for partying with 18-year-old girls at his Sardinian villa. Considering the political hurdles he has cleared in the past, it is unlikely these peccadilloes will loosen his grip on power.