The Miracle of Florence

Florence today has a population of around 360,000 and an area of around 100 sq km. ChatGPT informs me that the equivalent Indian city to Florence would be Sambalpur.

For nearly three centuries, beginning in the thirteenth century, Florence produced an extraordinary constellation of luminaries who launched the Renaissance and changed the course of our world. Here is a roll call of those who commanded the stage in that Sambalpur-sized city:

• Fibonacci
• Giotto
• Dante
• Boccaccio
• Petrarch
• Brunelleschi (who re-discovered the art of constructing the dome)
• Donatello 
• Ghiberti
• Pacioli (who invented double entry bookkeeping)
• Piero della Francesca
• Toscanelli (whose erroneous map spurred Columbus’ voyages)
• Amerigo Vespucci (after whom America is named)
• The Medicis:
  • Giovanni and Cosimo
  • Lorenzo the Magnificent
• Botticelli
• Savonarola (the zealot behind the Bonfire of the Vanities)
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Machiavelli,
• Michelangelo
• Galileo

Within a year of Galileo’s death, Isaac Newton was born in England and the Industrial Revloution was all set to be unleashed. As Paul Strathern in his ‘The Florentines: From Dante to Galileo’ puts it:

Thus the Renaissance would evolve into the Age of Enlightenment, which in turn became the Industrial Revolution. The world as we know it now was coming into being, founded on an earlier, more primitive era of dreams, pride, greed, political realism, techniques, fantasies, bitterness, and so much more. The seeds of ideas which had been sown amongst the warring towers of dark medieval Florence had miraculously blossomed and spread, to become the well-ordered garden – and accompanying dung heap – of our contemporary world.

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