Later History

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. Though wary enemies like the Albizzi feared Cosimo's growing power -- even though he rarely held any official office -- and got him imprisoned and then exiled in 1341, he was soon recalled by the Florentine people.

As Cosimo il Vecchio's behind-the-scenes power grew, he made sure to remain almost always a private citizen and businessman, serving the needs and interests of the working and middle class without needlessly angering the big fish in town. While his position also helped him increase his personal fortune, he took care to spend lavishly on the city, building churches, establishing charities, and patronizing artists. 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 Piero's rule was short and relatively undistinguished, quickly superseded by the brilliant career of his son, Lorenzo de' Medici, called Lorenzo the Magnificent.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. His political reign was a bit rocky at times; though he continued in his grandfather's manner to be a behind-the-scenes manipulator and adjudicator (and never actually led his city by title), he was a bit more overt about who was actually running the show.

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.

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.

A Tuscan Grand Duchy: The Long Snore

Cosimo's descendants continued to rule Florence and Tuscany in a pretty even, if uneventful, manner. Florence had already begun its long economic decline as a European power. The grand dukes became increasingly pretentious but for the most part harmless. Most did uphold the family intellectual tradition of patronizing the arts (unfortunately, many had a remarkable lack of good taste) and defending the sciences. It was largely due to Cosimo II's protection that Pisan scientist Galileo wasn't outright executed by the Inquisition for his heretical view that Earth revolved around the sun. The 49-year reign of the bookish, if generally genial, Ferdinando II was marked by nothing so much as a desire not to get involved in any nasty international affairs. The worst were men like the prudish glutton Cosimo III, a religious fanatic, money scrimper, and persecutor of Jews.

The last Medici grand duke was Gian Gastone, an obese sensualist who spent the few hours he wasn't passed out in a wine-sodden stupor playing with young men in bed. No one mourned his passing in 1737, when the grand dukedom passed to the Austrian Lorraine family, married into the Medici line for years. The Lorraines ruled with a much heavier hand and, even worse, a general disregard for traditional Florentine values. The citizens found themselves almost missing the Medici.

Gian Gastone was survived by his sister, Anna Maria de' Medici, a devout and dignified lady who, on her death in 1743, willed that the new Lorraine grand dukes would inherit the Medici's vast and mind-bogglingly valuable collection of art, manuscripts, furniture, books, and jewelry. She had only two conditions: None of it could ever be removed from Florence, and it all had to be made available to the public. The works of art filling the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace, and the Bargello are just the beginning of the artistic legacy Anna Maria created for Florence. It was her generosity that helped turn Florence into one of the world's greatest museums and a tourist mecca.

The Risorgimento: Italy Becomes A Country

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 Italy

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 50 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 racist and separatist Lega del Nord. Prodi returned to the fore in 2006, defeating Berlusconi by the slimmest of margins and with a very shaky coalition. It remains to be seen whether the center-left can hold onto power.

On a smaller scale, Tuscany and Umbria have seen both sorrow and joy over the past several years. In late 1997, Umbria was rocked by a series of massive earthquakes that destroyed town centers, left thousands homeless, and damaged artistic patrimonies. The most notable victim was Assisi, where many churches and buildings sustained such structural damage they remained closed until 2002 (many private dwellings are still unsafe and stand abandoned). The famed Basilica di San Francesco lost several Cimabue frescoes in a tremor that shook down the painted ceiling of the Upper Church, killing two hapless monks and partially damaging Giotto's renowned frescoes. The Lower Church reopened within weeks, but the major restoration on the Upper Basilica took 2 years (and some of it is still ongoing, though it no longer interferes with tourist visits). Tuscany has also recently enjoyed a unique sort of renaissance in the world of the cinema, led by Prato-area native Roberto Benigni's Oscar-winning La Vita è Bella (Life Is Beautiful), a fable about the Holocaust.

But putting aside glamour and catastrophe, Tuscany and Umbria today thrive on two main sources of economy and livelihood: the land and tourism. Both regions continue to be breadbaskets -- and, even more, wine casks -- in Italy, and most of the citizens are involved in the agricultural industry in some way. Events like the winter of 1985 -- when the Arno froze, and the lingering frost almost wiped out every last one of central Italy's olive trees -- hit the economy so hard they're still recovering. A bad year for the grapes can mean that half of Tuscany takes a major hit.

Mass tourism loves Tuscany. Florence is an essential stop on almost every package tour, and the region is by far Italy's most famous, often the only one foreigners know by name. It's also a precarious economy -- witness the drastic decline in tourism dollars in Italy in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks -- one that even in peaceful times is dependent on the economies of other countries.

Tourism can have detrimental effects on the vitality of a city as well. Many historic cores, Florence's included, have been all but given over to the tourists, with locals moving to the suburbs or to another city entirely. Part of what drives them out are the increasing restrictions on movement: While it was difficult a decade ago not to cheer as pedestrian-only zones started being erected in Italy's city centers, it does exacerbate an already horrible traffic problem, with parking lots taking over central piazze that were once important communal gathering places. It must be said, though, that much of the dilemma has been created by poor management of the pedestrianizing movement. Umbrian cities have actually been some of the most successful in Italy at the transformation. By creating large parking lots underground and in the valleys below the hilltop cities, and connecting them with town via elevators, escalators, and cog railways, such cities as Orvieto, Perugia, and Assisi have actually managed to make themselves blessedly traffic-free without creating too much of a hassle for those with cars.

Luckily, initiatives like those described above have been doing away with traffic difficulties. But the most egregious problem remains the pollution -- all those Fiats with no catalytic converters (still not required, or fitted, on Italian cars) spewing horrendous amounts of emission and pollutants into the air. In the past, Florence has actually had to issue warnings on certain summer days when, without wind to help carry some of the smog off, they've advised children and the elderly to stay indoors or wear masks to go outside. More visibly, the pollution blackens the historic buildings and outdoor sculpture on which the cities depend for their very survival. So public funds are raised to sandblast the local Duomo every 2 or 4 years, and half the monuments in the country stay wrapped in scaffolding at any given time for cleaning.