ABSTRACT
External and internal security thus provided the backdrop for a massive increase in urban development in Italy, both in the number of governmental and religious buildings constructed and in their size. Within the context of war and peace in cinquecento Italy princely government was on the ascendant and republicanism was to the wane. In the Papal States, Milan, Ferrara, Mantua and Florence, and lesser principalities in the peninsula throughout most of the quattrocento and cinquecento, ‘the principle of monarchy was supreme, but councils senates enabled the nobility to feel closely involved in government’. Bologna, the largest of the smaller cities of the north, also ceased to be of any real political importance in the cinquecento, though its decline was earlier than that of Urbino and Pesaro. Like the Venetian Republic, Lucca remained independent until the end of the eighteenth century, in Lucca’s case due in no small measure to the reconstruction of its defensive walls in the sixteenth century.
