The Tuscan banking town on the Arno that, in two extraordinary centuries, gave the world Dante's language, Renaissance art and architecture, the banking and credit practices behind modern finance, and Machiavelli's politics — a city of perhaps fifty thousand people that is remembered, above all, as the cradle of the Renaissance.
Florence was a wool town. It grew rich combing, dyeing, and selling cloth, and richer still lending the profits across Europe. Its coin, the gold florin, was trusted from London to Cairo. Then, in the span of two centuries, this middling merchant city produced Dante and Machiavelli, Brunelleschi's dome and Michelangelo's David, new forms of banking and the Renaissance portrait. The wealth that paid for it came from cloth and credit, and the family that paid for much of it — the Medici — dominated a republic that elected officials but, in practice, often did as the great families wished. Florence is the place most often called the birthplace of the Renaissance, and the claim is a judgment, not a fact: there were other centers, but none did so much, so fast.