Firenze Forma Continua aims to disseminate the history of the city of Florence and the Florentine territory by involving citizens, city users, students, researchers and visitors, creating connections between territory and people to form real ‘heritage communities’.
In 2017, in agreement with the Municipality of Florence, the Italian State invited the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and ICOMOS International to carry out an Advisory Mission following which the need emerged to look more closely at how ‘the Outstanding Universal Value of the site is expressed through the physical and social fabric […]’.
The invitation of the Consultative Mission is also perfectly in line with the foundations of the Faro Convention, which promotes the right of citizens, and the entire community, to know and enjoy their cultural heritage, including values, knowledge and traditions that are constantly evolving, as well as all aspects of the environment that are the result of interaction over time between people and places.
To meet this challenge, the Florence City Council’s Office for World Heritage and Relations with UNESCO launched the Firenze Forma Continua project, coordinated by Carlo Francini, Site Manager of the World Heritage Site Historic Centre of Florence with the collaboration of the joint HeRe Lab – Heritage Research Lab and the Department of Architecture of the University of Florence. Firenze Forma Continua thus became part of the projects of the Management Plan 2022 of the Historic Centre of Florence.
The Firenze Forma Continua portal is an awareness-raising site based on scientific research in which urban history is recounted by dividing it into its most representative phases. To each phase corresponds a card composed of a brief text and map of the territory.
The account of the city’s evolution, the permanent core of the site, is complemented each year by an in-depth study of a theme, the contents of which are developed alongside courses, seminars, workshops and university laboratories, so as actively to involve young students and researchers, creating a sensitive, attentive and willing community ready to disseminate the values of heritage.
The structure of the portal has been defined in such a way as to ensure the continuous rotation of in-depth topics and related itineraries, and the simultaneous archiving of material and research that will remain consultable over time in an archive open to future research.