ABSTRACT
Florentines developed highly complex ways of reading their urban environment, cataloging what they saw, heard, and imagined. This dynamic conception of the interrelation between social practices and urban space reveals how architecture was caught within structures of power, desire, and the interests of those who brought it into being, attempted to govern it, and who in various ways inhabited it. As alimentary abundance enters the city, architectural grandeur spills out into the countryside. Despite Giovanni Villani’s hyperbole, he knew that a foreign viewer would compare Florence to other cities and make moral judgments about the city’s inhabitants based on the measure and scale of its architectural physiognomy. The chapter shows that architecture, as a medium of urban expression, offered a way to mediate cross-cultural encounters that had nothing to do with religious antipathy or ethnic conflict but accepted urban diversity as a social fact.
