Premium Featured Accommodation

Medieval Florence - The City within a Wall

As the medieval period was drawing to its close, between the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century, the form of the city had been more or less stabilized.

In part this depended on the fact that its development had stopped far short of what the extensive perimeter of the last circle of walls (1284-1333), basically the same as the present ring of boulevards dating to the nineteenth century, might have led one to expect.

From that time on, up to the end of the nineteenth century, building activity depended less on an increase in population than on the operations of improvement, enlargement and renovation of structures considered outmoded or non-functional.

The aesthetic as well as functional criteria of regularity and order which appeared in Florence at the end of the thirteenth century were confirmed in the course of the fourteenth and are reflected in descriptions of the city in the 'chronicles' of Villani and others.

Articles