The Florentine writer, Boccaccio, captured the way the populations of Italian city-states viewed one another on a personal level. In his Decameron, Boccacio disparaged citizens of nearly all Italian cities except his own–Florence–and Bologna.

For example, he calls the Sienese credulous and the Venetians untrustworthy, Pisan women are ugly and Perugian men are sodomites, in the Marches the males are uncouth and mean-hearted, like those from Pistoia, who are also rogues.

The south contributes its share of wickedness with assassins from Sicily and thieves and grave-robbers from Naples, but no people rival the ‘rapacious and money-grubbing’ Genoese, who are depicted as pirates, misers and murderers.

Boccaccio’s happy fornicators and shameless adulterers come from all over Italy, but the only consistently good people live in Florence, where the women are all beautiful and the men are noble, chivalrous, agreeable and wise.

Medieval Italians talked of their city as if it were a kind of paradise, its life regulated by sublime statutes framed by lawyers at the new University of Bologna. They were proud of its appearance, especially as culture was then chiefly civic and communal; the great age of individual patronage, both noble and ecclesiastic, came later. Entire populations would turn out with trumpets and pipes to celebrate an artistic event, as the people of Siena did in 1311 when they escorted Duccio’s Maestà from the painter’s workshop outside the city through the gate in the walls and up to the cathedral.

Since things were constructed in their name – and not, as later, in that of the Medici in Florence or the Gonzaga in Mantua – they could take a proprietorial interest in the paving of streets, the laying out of squares, the building of stone bridges.

Nine centuries after their emergence, the city-states remain embedded in Italy’s psyche, the crucial component of its people’s identity and of their social and cultural inheritance. Modern inhabitants of these cities are still proud of their heritage and feel responsibility for its retention. That is why the town centres – though not unfortunately much of the country outside them – are so well preserved today.

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 1262-1271) and (Kindle Locations 1250-1256). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

…In the hierarchy of Florentine guilds of the period the most influential were those of judges, bankers, doctors, dealers in silk, traders in wool and furriers, who were much in demand in winter because pelts were cheaper than cloth. Florence’s Arte dei medici e speziali, which included doctors, surgeons, dentists and opticians, had over a thousand members: after passing their exams doctors had to promise to refrain from taverns and brothels and in return they were rewarded by the city with a horse, an attendant and exemption from paying taxes.  Surviving Florentine guildhalls, such as those of the silk makers and the wool merchants, are among the city’s loveliest buildings.

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 1313-1319). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.