Myth and History of the Renaissance City: Florence, Rome,Venice
Dr. John Paoletti

Cities in Italy, like those of other countries, have their own specific characteristics. During the Renaissance, Italian cities quite deliberately sought distinctive artistic styles to distinguish them from their rivals. Since there was no “Italy” in the late middle ages but a contiguous group of individual city-states vying for supremacy over adjacent territories, it should not be surprising that their architecture, art, and civic identities were elaborated to distinguish them from rival neighbors and to identify them as specific urban entities within the larger spaces of what we now know as Italy. We will consider three of the most prominent of these urban spaces - Rome, Florence, and Venice - and discuss how their understanding of themselves – and themselves as distinct from others – was broadcast visually through their art and architecture.