Florence, Italy

The Ancient City and the Collapse of the Roman Empire

The city the Romans called Florentia was founded in 59 BC by Julius Caesar on a plain near the banks of the Arno River, at a narrow spot where crossing was easiest (the Etruscans had founded a town much earlier on the hillside to the north on the site of modern day Fiesole). The new town was laid out as a castrum: proceeding from a central umbilicus, the surveyor (agrimensor) established the principal east–west and north–south streets (the decumanus and cardo, respectively), defined the limits of the town, and laid out the gridded network of streets; the forum was located near the umbilicus. Its position near the wider Roman road network (especially the Via Cassia) helped the town to flourish. The leisure components missing from the original foun-dation—a theater, amphitheater, baths, and so on-were established beyond the original wall circuit in the first and second centuries AD.

Set out on the cardinal axes, Florentia only approximately responded to the course of the river and was removed from it by the equivalent of a few blocks; a wooden bridge extended from the southern end of the cardo to span the Arno toward a small suburb pinched between the riverbanks and the hills rising to the south. This original Roman urban framework—cardo and decumanus, grid, walls, and to a certain extent bridge—is still evident when looking at a map or aerial photograph of the modern city.

Florence, like Rome itself, achieved a degree of stability after the collapse of the western empire and its replacement by the Byzantines, albeit at a much reduced scale—first under the Ostragoths and later the Lombards. New walls were introduced well inside the original Roman circuit, corresponding to the shrunken population (from 20,000 under the Romans to perhaps as few as 1,000). By AD 500, however, the foundation of the city's two principal churches, San Lorenzo (the first cathedral) and Santa Reparata (the future site of the Duomo), indicates a degree of modest recovery, in part because these structures were located outside the reduced mural circuit. These vulnerable centers of devotion are precursors of later ecclesiastical foundations that would push the city's growth outward from the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries. Near the end of Lombard rule, perhaps during the seventh century, the Baptistery was built facing Santa Reparata; its role as the site of baptism for every Florentine citizen made it an urban focus on par with the Duomo.

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