Florence is known as the cradle of the Renaissance and is still wonderfully preserved as a Renaissance city, with a the wealth of Renaissance art and architecture, that remain the city’s unique treasures.

 

You can look at Florence in a thousand ways. A famous name around the world, which parades by centuries with her mantle of history and remains one of the cities with the highest tourist attraction.
The nuances of a city that gave its heyday in the Renaissance are manifold.

There is the monumental Florence that keeps in the breadth of the avenues, in the sumptuous facades, the size and elegance of its period as the capital of Italy. There is the medieval Florence, with the alleys that coil in the historic center, around buildings that evoke the age of Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio.
There is just the beautiful Florence, the one that would watch for hours, as we observe a lover, the Florence dressed with its art, in its unique architecture and in the works of the museums, flowed from an age of grace in which the beauty and inspiration have reached very high levels.

The beautiful Florence, the unique views, which deliver thoughts, in a spring evening, watching the Arno from the Ponte Vecchio or strolling in the art of the Boboli gardens, enjoy an open air dinner in the corners of its squares, framed by marble and stone of history.

Florence is a city that offers a lot into manageable spaces. A fascinating dimension that makes good place to live in the present, because it retains of an unique past

Florence

Italian Firenze, Latin Florentia, city, capital of Firenze provincia (province) and Toscana (Tuscany) regione (region), central Italy.

The city, located about 145 miles (230 km) northwest of Rome, is surrounded by gently rolling hills that are covered with villas and farms, vineyards, and orchards. Florence was founded as a Roman military colony about the 1st century bce, and during its long history it has been a republic, a seat of the duchy of Tuscany, and a capital (1865–70) of Italy. During the 14th–16th century Florence achieved preeminence in commerce and finance, learning, and especially the arts.

The present glory of Florence is mainly its past. Indeed, its historic centre was inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1982. The buildings there are works of art abounding in yet more works of art, and the splendours of the city are stamped with the personalities of the men who made them. The geniuses of Florence were backed by men of towering wealth, and the city to this day gives testimony to their passions for religion, for art, for power, or for money. Among the most famous of the city’s cultural giants are Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dante, Machiavelli, Galileo, and its most-renowned rulers, generations of the Medici family.

Scholars still marvel that this small city of moneylenders and cloth makers without much political or military power rose to a position of enormous influence in Italy, Europe, and beyond. The Florentine vernacular became the Italian language, and the local coin, the florin, became a world monetary standard. Florentine artists formulated the laws of perspective; Florentine men of letters, painters, architects, and craftsmen began the period known as the Renaissance; and a Florentine navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, gave his name to two continents.

The city has remained an important cultural, economic, political, and artistic force into the modern era, setting trends in political administration (especially under Mayor Giorgio La Pira in the 1950s and early ’60s) and even cultural innovation (as in its influential Modernist train station designed under Giovanni Michelucci, its football [soccer] stadium by Pier Luigi Nervi, and the Archizoom radical design movement active during the 1960s and ’70s). The region around the city has a modern and dynamic economy based on small industrial production. The city itself is far more dependent on tourism, though it also has developed newer sectors such as information technology. Florence’s key role as a market centre is reinforced by its location at the nexus of transport lines connecting northern and southern Italy. Area 40 square miles (104 square km). Pop. (2006 est.) 366,901.

 

Character of the city

Florence was founded to control the only practicable north-south crossing of the Arno River to and from the three passes through the Apennines: one to Faenza and two to Bologna. Two thin streams, the Mugnone and the Affrico, come down through town to meet the Arno. The Affrico, not far away from its source in the Apennines, is usually a grudging gurgle amid wide gravel beds far below the quays, but sometimes it rises and swells into a powerful stream, ravaging the city with floods. The city’s water supply has also served as an asset, however, making possible the washing, fulling, and dyeing of cloth, resulting in the development of a major industry.