Location of Historic Centre of Florence in Tuscany
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Historic Centre of Florence (Italy)
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Built on the site of an Etruscan settlement, Florence, the symbol of the Renaissance, rose to economic and cultural pre-eminence under the Medici in the 15th and 16th centuries. Its 600 years of extraordinary artistic activity can be seen above all in the 13th-century cathedral (Santa Maria del Fiore), the Church of Santa Croce, the Uffizi and the Pitti Palace, the work of great masters such as Giotto, Filippo Brunelleschi, Sandro Botticelli and Michelangelo.[3]
Aspect
Closed inside the avenues traced on the old medieval walls, the historic centre of Florence collects the city's most important cultural heritage sites. Delimited by the 14th century wall circuit, built thanks to the economic and commercial power reached at the time, knew its maximum splendor in the following two centuries.
The northern part of the old town is surrounded by the avenues of Viali di Circonvallazione, a series of large six-lane avenues inspired by Parisian boulevard created when Florence was the capital of Italy.
The center of Florence, with its hundreds of business activities is a paradise for shopping and entertainment: elegant boutiques, historic cafes, the lively street markets, as well as hosting numerous nightclubs, discos, American-bar and meeting places for a drink (the famous Negroni cocktail was born here).
Gianfranco Caniggia offers a comprehensive survey of the development process of Florence since the Roman era in his lecture "A Structural Reading of Florence" presented at ETH Zurich in 1984 and reissued in 2022 as a film-video.