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Florence got rich on cloth and then got much richer on trust. The florin was struck in gold from 1252 and held its weight so reliably that merchants across Europe settled accounts in it, which turned a Tuscan wool town into the continent's clearing house. The Medici started in wool, moved into banking in 1397, and spent the returns on art because art was what respectable money did with itself. The Renaissance people queue for is a balance sheet.
The cathedral's dome, begun in 1420 and still the largest masonry dome ever built at 45.5 metres across. The cathedral had stood open to the sky for decades because nobody knew how to close a span that wide. Brunelleschi's answer was two shells, one inside the other, tied by twenty-four ribs and built without the wooden centering that would normally hold an arch up.
The octagonal baptistery opposite the cathedral, older than almost everything around it, carrying Ghiberti's gilded bronze east doors. He started them in 1425 and finished twenty-seven years later, twelve years modelling and casting and fifteen more chasing and gilding. Michelangelo is credited with the nickname. What you see outside is a replica; the originals are indoors.
The fortified town hall, and the seat of a republic that spent most of its history arguing about whether it was one. The tower is off-centre because it was built onto an existing structure rather than designed whole. Cosimo I moved the ducal household in and then out again, which is the reason the Vasari Corridor exists at all.
Purpose-built in the 1560s as government offices, which is precisely what uffizi means, and only later filled with the Medici collection. The building's long thin U-shape follows its bureaucratic origins rather than any gallery logic. It is a filing cabinet that became one of the most important art collections in the world.
An enclosed passage of 1565 running one storey up from the Palazzo Vecchio through the Uffizi, over the Ponte Vecchio and on to the Pitti Palace, so that Cosimo I could cross his own city without meeting anyone in it. It runs above shopfronts and through a church gallery. The whole point of it was avoiding the street.
The shop-lined bridge over the Arno, occupied by jewellers because of a smell complaint. Butchers and fishmongers worked here until 1593, when Ferdinando I evicted them by decree on the grounds that the stench was unacceptable beneath the Medici's private corridor. Goldsmiths replaced them and the decree has never been repealed.
The enormous palace the Medici bought from a rival family and then expanded until it dwarfed anything the original owners had imagined, with formal gardens climbing the hill behind. Buying a competitor's house and making it bigger was the point. The gardens were among the earliest of their kind and set a template later copied at Versailles.
The Franciscan church where Michelangelo, Galileo and Machiavelli are buried, which makes it a national pantheon as much as a place of worship. The Dante monument here is a cenotaph raised in 1829 in the expectation that Ravenna would eventually hand the body back. It never has, and the tomb has stood empty ever since.
The family's mausoleum behind San Lorenzo, including the New Sacristy that Michelangelo designed and populated with his own sculpture. The scale is the tell: a merchant banking family building itself a burial complex on the scale of a royal house. It is the clearest physical statement of what the money was ultimately for.
Home to Michelangelo's David, moved indoors in 1873 after centuries outside in the Piazza della Signoria. The statue was carved from a block other sculptors had already worked and abandoned as ruined. What most visitors miss is the corridor of unfinished Michelangelo slaves on the way in, figures still half inside their stone.
A grain market converted into a church, its exterior niches filled with statues commissioned by the individual guilds, each one paying for its own patron saint in a visible competition. This is the economy of Florence rendered as sculpture: wool, silk, bankers and armourers, each buying frontage on the same building.
Brunelleschi's church across the river, finished after his death, with a facade left deliberately blank. The interior is the more rigorous piece of architecture he built, a demonstration of proportion carried through without decoration. The square outside is where the neighbourhood actually lives, which is increasingly rare this close to the centre.
Florence started its cathedral dome without knowing how to build it.
The drum stood open for decades because no one could span 45.5 metres. Brunelleschi, trained as a goldsmith rather than an architect, solved it with a self-supporting double shell that needed no wooden centering. It remains the largest masonry dome ever constructed.
One bronze door took twenty-seven years.
Ghiberti began the Baptistery's east doors in 1425: twelve years to model and cast the reliefs, fifteen more to chase and gild them. Michelangelo is credited with calling them the Gates of Paradise, and the panels outside today are copies.
The butchers were thrown off the Ponte Vecchio for smelling bad, and the order still stands.
In 1593 Ferdinando I de' Medici expelled the butchers and fishmongers because the odour reached the private corridor his family used to cross the river. Goldsmiths took the shops and the decree has never been rescinded.
The Germans blew up every bridge in Florence in 1944 except one.
The retreating army destroyed all the Arno crossings in the centre and left the Ponte Vecchio standing, an exception generally credited to its artistic value and to the intervention of the German consul Gerhard Wolf, later made an honorary citizen.
A duke built a private corridor across the city so he would never have to walk in it.
The Vasari Corridor was completed in 1565 to let Cosimo I move between the Palazzo Vecchio and the Pitti Palace above the heads of his subjects, running through the Uffizi and over the Ponte Vecchio.
Europe's most trusted currency was a Tuscan city's house coin.
The gold florin, struck from 1252, held its weight and purity so consistently that merchants far outside Florence settled in it. That reliability, more than the wool that came first, is what made the city a financial centre.
The Uffizi was built as an office block.
Uffizi means offices. The building went up in the 1560s to house Florentine administrative bodies, and its long narrow shape follows that function. The art collection arrived later and the world's most famous filing system became a gallery.
Florence built Dante a tomb, sent for the body, and monks hid it for three centuries.
He died exiled in Ravenna in 1321. When Florence came to reclaim him in 1519, Franciscan friars removed the bones and concealed them. They surfaced in 1865, walled up in a cloister in a wooden box marked Dantis ossa. The cenotaph raised at Santa Croce in 1829 is still empty.
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