Every "quartiere" had its own peculiar character, distinguished by the trades that were carried on there and by the palaces of the rich families whose children, servants, retainers and guards could be seen talking and playing round the "loggie," - the colonnaded open-air meeting grounds where business was also discussed. Inside that long wall there were well over 50,000 inhabitants, less than there were in Paris, Naples, Venice and Milan, but more than in most other European cities, including London - though it was impossible to be sure of the exact number, births being recorded by the haphazard method of dropping beans into a box, a black bean for a boy, a white one for a girl.įor administrativepurposes the city was divided into four "quartieri" and each "quartiere" was in turn divided into four wards which were named after heraldic emblems. It was a city of squares and towers, of busy, narrow, twisting streets, of fortress - like palaces with massive stone walls and overhanging balconies, of old churches whose facades were covered with geometrical patterns in black and white and green and pink, of abbeys and convents, nunneries, hospitals and crowded tenements, all enclosed by a high brick and stone crenellated wall beyond which the countryside stretched to the green surrounding hills.
Through the narrow slit of its single window, so he later recorded, he looked down upon the city. A few minutes later the captain of the guard told him to follow him up the stairs but, instead of being shown into the Council Chamber, Cosimo de' Medici was escorted up into the bell-tower and pushed into a cramped cell known as the Alberghettino - the Little Inn - the door of which was shut and locked behind him. As he entered the palace gate an official came up to him and asked him to wait in the courtyard: he would be taken up to the Council Chamber as soon as the meeting being held there was over. His name was Cosimo de' Medici and he was said to be one of the richest men in the world.
One September morning in 1433, a thin man with a hooked nose and sallow skin could have been seen walking towards the steps of the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence.
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