A Renaissance city built to be walked, not just admired from a distance.

Florence’s rise began with money rather than art: the florin, minted from 1252, became medieval Europe’s most trusted currency, and the wool and banking fortunes it built gave the Medici family, first under Cosimo de’ Medici and later his grandson Lorenzo “il Magnifico,” the means to bankroll the painters, sculptors and architects who would define the Renaissance. Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome over the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, completed in 1436, remains the clearest proof of that patronage’s ambition: the largest brick dome ever built, raised without external buttresses or a wooden supporting frame, its self-supporting herringbone brick pattern solving an engineering problem no one had managed since antiquity. The Uffizi, now among the world’s great art museums, began life in the 1560s as Cosimo I de’ Medici’s administrative offices — the word uffizi simply means “offices” — and only opened its collection to the public in 1765, its corridors of Medici-commissioned masterpieces originally a private family archive rather than a gallery built to be seen.

The city has not always kept what it built. On 4 November 1966, the Arno burst its banks in the worst flood in Florence’s modern history, submerging much of the historic centre under water and mud that in places reached several metres deep and damaging or destroying an enormous number of artworks and rare manuscripts; the volunteers who arrived from across the world to help recover them, working in the mud with their bare hands, became known as the Mud Angels, and their restoration techniques are still taught today. The Ponte Vecchio survived that flood as it had survived an earlier catastrophe: in August 1944, retreating German forces blew up every bridge across the Arno except this one, reportedly on Hitler’s own direct order, choosing instead to block its access streets with rubble — leaving the medieval bridge and its overhanging goldsmiths’ shops as the only crossing in Florence to make it through the war intact.