Florence

Florence is an absolutely stunning city in Italy, one of the most beautiful cities in the world.

Long ago, Florence was a separate country, called simply the Republic of Florence. That was in the Middle Ages. There was no Italy yet — it appeared only in 1861. Instead, the famous boot-shaped peninsula consisted of a dozen tiny countries that had formed around the largest cities.

Such countries are called city-states. Florence, Venice, Pisa, Milan, Genoa, Siena, Bologna, Naples — we know all these names as Italian cities, but once they were all capitals of countries with the same names: the Republic of Venice, the Duchy of Milan, the Kingdom of Naples, and so on.

Historians sometimes call such a bouquet of city-states “feudal fragmentation.”

The term has a negative connotation and is usually used as a synonym for the breakup of a country. It was especially popular in the Soviet Union, which is no surprise: the USSR was a huge country with a strong central government. On Wikipedia, an article on this term exists in only 6 languages, including Russian and Ukrainian.

In fact, city-states are one of the most successful models of development. It’s simple: local authorities usually know better how to develop their region. The huge bureaucracy that fattens up in giants like the USSR may have vast resources, but it is clumsy and poorly understands what is happening in the regions.

Florence is a good example of how effective microstates can be. In its day, it was the center of the Renaissance. Literally all the top figures who are now mistakenly considered Italians lived and worked here: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, Machiavelli, Galileo Galilei, Amerigo Vespucci.

A few more “Italians,” only less famous ones, built the absolutely incredible Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, which seems unreal until you see it with your own eyes.

Interestingly, you can only photograph this giant from a distance. Up close, the cathedral simply doesn’t fit anywhere: neither in the frame nor in the narrow gaps between the houses.

The cathedral was conceived from the start to be as big as possible, with no budget limits. The goal was to outdo the neighboring republics, Pisa and Siena. This is another feature of “feudal fragmentation”: competition at the state level for new citizens and investment.

The result was the second-largest church of its time. Only St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican was bigger, and it would have been simply indecent to outdo it. The cathedral took almost 150 years to build. During that time, Florence managed to conquer Pisa, so there was no one left to compete with.

The walls of the cathedral are faced with marble of three colors: white, green, and pink. It was deliberately brought to Florence from three different quarries. The story is somewhat reminiscent of the Taj Mahal, for which marble was also gathered from all over.

The cathedral is covered in marble from top to bottom, including the bell tower.

Statues hide in niches on the facade. The amount of detail in the decoration is simply incredible. Just look at the reliefs and the decorative spiral columns!

Amid all this marble splendor, only the dome stands out: it is made entirely of red brick.

The dome alone took 16 years to build, and work on it began around the 130th year of the cathedral’s construction. The project was led by Brunelleschi. You haven’t heard of him, and neither had I. Well, this Brunelleschi figured out how to build a dome of eight tiled segments that converged toward the center and rested on a central point!

So the dome has no support at all: it simply balances itself. They say this Brunelleschi didn’t even have an architectural education. He was more of an engineer and learned architecture by climbing around the ruins of Ancient Rome.

The result is the largest brick dome in the world. It weighs as much as 37,000 tons and is made of 4 million bricks, which the people of Pisa must have been shitting when Florence declared war on them.

Besides the cathedral, Florence has one more recognizable sight. Apart from the dome, the reader has surely seen photos of an incredible bridge covered with houses.

That’s in Florence too. The city used to have many such bridges, but only one survived — the Ponte Vecchio. The others were destroyed by Hitler’s retreating troops.

The houses on the bridge aren’t residential, of course. They are shops. Inside the bridge is an ordinary Arab-style bazaar.

According to one theory, the word “bankrupt” comes from Florence. It derives from the Italian phrase banca rotta, which means “broken bench.” They say that when a merchant at this bazaar on the bridge fell into debt, “bailiffs” came and broke his bench with the goods.

Not far from the bridge stands a quirky building that clearly stands out from the yellow-brown mass around it.

This is the gallery called the Uffizi — the oldest museum in Europe. It was founded by one of the dukes of the Medici family. The dynasty with this unusual name ruled first Florence and then the new state that absorbed it, Tuscany.

Having turned from bankers into rulers, the Medici sponsored and protected the art and science of Florence throughout their history. It was they who helped Leonardo da Vinci at the start of his career and got Galileo house arrest instead of prison.

The Uffizi is one of dozens of museums, galleries, palaces, and libraries the Medici created during their 300 years in power. But what a museum it is! It holds 150,000 works of art, the most famous of which is Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus.”

Another delightful museum in Florence is the Galleria dell’Accademia. In a completely unremarkable building somewhere off the center stands the statue of David by Michelangelo himself.

The author has never seen anything more incredible in his life.

The thing is, making a sculpture of a person even of normal height with this much detail is damn hard. It’s even harder to double the size of the sculpture while keeping the proportions right. After all, people look up at a four-meter statue from below!

So Michelangelo deliberately made the torso narrow and the head a bit larger than normal. Seen from below, the proportions look right, but look closely and David’s head is huge.

The amount of detail is absolutely incredible. How could anyone carve the veins on the hands out of a block of marble with a chisel?

But actually, in Florence you don’t even have to go to a museum. Sculptures stand right in the street, in the open air. Copies, of course.

Forget the sculptures — the city itself is a work of art.

In Florence you can play with light and shadow, catch intricate shapes, and lie in wait for unusual people forever.

Florence is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. It’s just silly to come here for a single day.

No, you need at least a week to step into every museum, find every nook, examine every detail, and catch every street scene.