Benedetto Dei's Descriptions of Florence (1470-72)

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Title
Benedetto Dei's Descriptions of Florence (1470-72)
Description
What is it that made Florence a city in the 1470s?
This dataset is the first attempt to spatialize two textual descriptions of the city of Florence by the poet and chronicler Benedetto Dei, the Cronica (ASFi, MS 119) and Memorie notate (Riccardiana, Cod. Riccardiano 1853).

Through lists of people and their occupation, churches, piazzas and families, Benedetto represents the urban fabric of Florence as giving visual expression to the new socio-economic elites. From 1469 Lorenzo il Magnifico had centralized the power of the city, bringing to the fore commercial and banking economic enterprises, which would overshadow older manufacturing and mercantile corporations. The constant comparison of 'Firenze bella' with the main Italian and European cities of the period was a novel element, which reflected Dei’s international gaze as a commercial agent for the Medici bank. His account of the city’s urban and architectural transformations reflects how families appropriated public space, each gathering around a piazza. Florence is ultimately defined as an organic system, one in which the banking families appeared as the leading force for socio-economic success.
We have addressed the challenge of sites with generic locations (which are given approximate geo-referencing) and people who are not identified by their names, here reported as ‘n/d’. Plotting this wealth of information onto the map allowed us to think about the city and its networks spatially, via this late fifteenth-century snapshot afforded by Dei’s writings.
This geodataset draws on the texts transcribed by Giuseppina Carla Rombi in her essay 'Descrizioni e Rappresentazioni della città di Firenze nel XV secolo' (Florence, 1976).
Is Part Of
City Descriptions: Text and Image
number
02

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