The city’s resistance to crises

The Arno floods Florence

/ 1333

After the extraordinary economic and demographic growth that took place during the thirteenth century, Florence experienced a period of repeated crises, which hindered the development of financial and entrepreneurial activities and slowed the urban expansion. The ruinous flooding of the Arno in 1333 resulted in serious damage throughout the city, destroying houses, devastating shops, damaging the new city walls and ruining bridges and fishponds. Moreover, in 1348, the plague, which had reappeared in Europe after a long time, wreaked havoc in Florence, causing thousands of deaths and the depopulation of the city, decimating its administrative and entrepreneurial classes, as well as its worker and artisan classes. In addition to the natural calamities, in the 1340s there was a period of serious economic crisis, caused by the bankruptcy of some of the city’s major banking companies and the financial difficulties of the Municipality. Finally, in 1378, the revolt of the workers employed in the least skilled tasks in wool production, exposed the latent social tensions in the city.

Despite this, in these decades the urban structure of Florence was consolidated and expanded, pragmatically designing new roads in the still vacant land between the last two city walls and encouraging the parcelling of lots. Once again, the impetus of the religious orders, owners of large plots of land in the expansion areas, was crucial. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, for example, the Camaldolesi urbanised a large area around their monastery in the Oltrarno by laying out a number of streets, including today’s Via dell’Orto, and dividing the land into lots suitable for the construction of houses. Shortly afterwards, in the 1320s, the Cistercians of the Abbey of S. Salvatore in Settimo also built some roads and subdivided land on their property between Via della Scala and Via Palazzuolo. Initiatives of this kind were repeated in other peripheral areas of the city, producing a network of minor roads that completed the system of more important road axes, directed from the city centre towards the gates of the new city walls. A focal point of this system was the four bridges, rebuilt after the flood of 1333, to which the city council planned to add a fifth at the eastern end of the city, the Ponte Reale, envisaged as a link between the road coming from Arezzo and the circular road outside the walls. Although construction was begun, the bridge was never built.

Instead, the centre of government around the Palazzo dei Priori was strengthened with the construction in 1359 of the Palazzo del Tribunale della Mercanzia, responsible for judging commercial disputes. From the beginning of the fourteenth century, the area was also the seat of other municipal magistracies, and this role found a clear spatial expression in the square created between 1299 and 1356 by demolishing houses and towers. The large space – the present-day Piazza della Signoria – was then made more regular and monumental by imposing a uniform wall covering on the buildings on the north side (1362), widening the final stretch of Via dei Calzaioli (1389) and constructing a grandiose loggia on the south side for the Signoria’s public ceremonies (1374-1382).

The creation of the civic centre coincided with the rearrangement and renovation of the city’s main religious centre, focused on the church of Santa Reparata while the gigantic new cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and its bell tower slowly grew around it. A further hub was the commercial district whose centres were the Mercato Vecchio and Nuovo squares, to which the square of San Michele in Orto, used for the sale of cereals, was added as early as the thirteenth century. Here, starting in 1337, a monumental covered market was built, surmounted by enormous warehouses, soon converted into a sort of civic temple under the protection of the guilds: the church of Orsanmichele.