From Vasari’s 1560 office block for Florentine magistrates to a 5.3-million-visitor museum, via a 1737 pact that kept the Medici collection in the city and a 1993 Mafia bombing.
florence
The Florence brothers who photographed a nation into being
Founded in 1852, Fratelli Alinari built a 5.5-million-image archive of Italian art and architecture that shaped art history teaching abroad, and passed into public ownership under Regione Toscana in 2019-2020.
How Brunelleschi raised Florence’s dome without a scaffold
For 50 years the crossing of Florence Cathedral stood open to the sky until Filippo Brunelleschi’s herringbone brickwork and sandstone chains let the dome build itself, course by course, from 1420 to 1436.