L'Italy it was unified as a nation-state only in the 19th century. Since the fall ofRoman Empire, the nation was largely divided between autonomous cities and regional kingdoms. Still, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, Italy recorded aGolden age, known as Renaissance, with admirable works in art and science, as well as intrigues and conflicts.
To understand
Middle Ages and Renaissance in Italy: full screen map.Middle Ages
Those who lived before 1500 AD obviously they did not use the term "Middle Ages" to define their times. The concept of "Middle Ages" was coined in the 17th century, to describe the period in which the ideals of the Ancient Greece andRoman Empire were lost with the fall of Rome in the 5th century.
During this millennium, theEurope it was dominated by feudal monarchies. Italy was an exception, in fact power was in the hands of the city-states (organized in the form of a municipality) and small counties. Many of them had a prosperous merchant class, which they earned from Silk Road and from other routes.
National identity arose only at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. Previously the small Italian states felt such only as part of the peninsula, but they did not have a common cultural heritage nor a language. City-states were usually rivals, although the Catholic Church was a unifying force. Although most of the city-states had their own languages, such as Venetian a Venice and the Neapolitan a Naples, the popularity of the works of Dante Alighieri and Alessandro Manzoni gradually led the Tuscan language to become the lingua franca of the entire Italian peninsula, selected as the basis for standard Italian at the time of unification.
The period from 1000 A.D. in the mid-fourteenth century it is today described as the Middle Ages; in Italy and in other European countries it has seen the rise of cathedrals, universities and castles that have survived to this day. Italy became a thoroughfare for the Crusades to the Holy Land. This period of relative progress is believed to have ended with the Great Famine in 1310 and the Black Plague of 1340.
Renaissance
The Greco-Roman cultural baggage survived in part through the Byzantine, Islamic and Ottoman civilizations, and the arts and sciences and politics in Italy and Europe made significant progress as early as 1000 AD. For this reason some historians today reject the presence of a break between "Middle Ages" and "Renaissance", which therefore constitute a single great epoch. Others, on the contrary, support the thesis of discontinuity with respect to the Middle Ages, underlining how, according to him, medieval man has no value except as a member of a community or an order, while only in the Renaissance would an attitude take place in Italy, marked by the birth of lordships and principalities, freer and more individualistic on the part of man towards politics and life in general.
The Italian Renaissance generated a cultural and artistic civilization, which had as one of the main centers Florence where the first Florentine humanism originated, which affirmed the primacy of the active life over the contemplative one. From Florence the new cultural movement will reach the Neapolitan Aragonese court of Alfonso I, the papal court of Pius II, the humanist pope, and of Leo X, and the Milanese court of Ludovico il Moro. The Renaissance, as a natural outlet for Humanism, then spread throughout its specific aspects Europe from the mid-fourteenth century to the whole of the sixteenth century and had as its primary objective the recovery and re-evaluation of ancient classicism as a model of the naturalness of man and his earthly values, questioning the religious vision that had influenced the culture of the whole medieval period. According to the humanists of the period, classical works during the Middle Ages had undergone strong interpretative alterations, from which they had to be freed. The Renaissance intellectual did not limit himself, as in the previous humanism, to a theoretical study of classical work, but instead wanted to draw an example from it to turn it to practical experimentation.
The Renaissance is also a moment of particular flowering of the arts and letters, the former characterized by the development of certain forms and techniques such as perspective and oil painting, and the latter by philology and the cult of humanae litterae (classical literature inspired by the concept of humanitas where the term humanism comes from) freed from the encrustations of divinae litterae medieval where religious interests prevailed.
Oil painting on canvas and wood was developed in the 15th century in Italy and in Netherlands and became the most iconic legacy of the Renaissance; you see European art.
Among the technologies that developed starting from the 15th century we find printing (which brought the Bible, ancient literature, legal documents and news to common people), gunpowder (which upset the feudal system by making it obsolete the castles and cavalry) and the compass (which made navigation easier).
The decimal numbers were indisputably adopted by the oriental peoples and are still known today as Arabic numbers. Although they were known in southern Europe from the 10th century, printing brought them to widespread use in the 15th century.
Renaissance ideals spread to the rest of Europe in the 1500s and contributed to the Protestant Reformation, in which Christian congregations withdrew from the Roman Catholic Church. While Protestants were successful in many parts of Northern Europe, they failed in Italy, which has remained almost universally Catholic.
When Vasco da Gama discovered the Cape route around theAfrica, trade between Europe and Asia moved from the Mediterranean to the ocean, making Italy less important.
Decline
Following the Italian wars of the 1500s, the Italian states lost their cultural and economic dominion, and some of them were conquered by foreign empires, such as the Spain and the Kingdom of France, with the Ottomans gaining control of some of their possessions in the eastern Mediterranean. Subsequently theAustria it occupied a large part of northern Italy. Italy was not unified until the 19th century and the cities and regions today maintain a strong, highly differentiated cultural identity, often with roots in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Although politically divided, the Italian peninsula has remained the main European center of fashion, visual arts and classical music to this day. Italy was an important destination of the Grand Tour, the traditional educational journey for the few young men and women who could afford to travel.
Destinations
Northeastern Italy
- Bologna - Probably home to the oldest university in the world, the University of Bologna.
- Forlì - Back from a lively artistic scene in the fourteenth century, Forlì was immediately at the forefront in the field of the new style with Ansuino da Forlì, who worked alongside Mantegna in the Ovetari Chapel in Padua.
- Mantua - The city of the Gonzagas, World Heritage ofUNESCO together with Sabbioneta.
- Ravenna - This ancient Roman city is famous for its 6th century churches and Byzantine mosaics.
- Venice - Capital of the Republic of Venice, it is full of splendid Gothic and Renaissance buildings. While La Serenissima lost its status of independent republic in 1797, its golden times (and most of its architecture) date back to the Renaissance.
- Verona - Famous for the location by Shakespeare Romeo and Juliet, the city's real-life story is also exciting.
Northwestern Italy
- 1 Genoa - It controlled the western half of the Mediterranean and is the birthplace of Christopher Columbus.
- 2 Milan - The Duomo is the most famous building in Milan, in the Gothic style which was begun in 1386 and was completed in almost 600 years.
- 3 Turin - The Renaissance style was established in the Cathedral, dedicated to San Giovanni, a construction due to the Tuscan Meo del Caprina between 1491 and 1498. In addition to the Cathedral, from the Renaissance period they can be considered parts of the Citadel and Palazzo Scaglia di Verrua.
central Italy
- Arezzo - Arezzo's central Piazza Grande is medieval, and this ancient city features the Gothic Basilica of San Domenico, which has a Crucifix painted by the late Romanesque master, Cimabue; the medieval church of San Francesco, which contains the frescoes of the Legend of the True Cross by the Renaissance master, Piero della Francesca; and the Duomo, where Guido d'Arezzo invented the solfeggio musical system in the early 11th century.
- Asciano - The small hamlet of Chiusure preserves the Abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, a Benedictine monastery of the eleventh century which is still active today; it contains frescoes by the Renaissance master, Luca Signorelli on one side of the cloister and an inlaid wooden choir from the 15th century.
- Assisi - Assisi is the medieval city of San Francesco, from which the current pope took his name; the Basilica of San Francesco, which contains works by Cimabue, Giotto, Simone Martini and Pietro Lorenzetti, although damaged by the 1997 earthquake and carefully restored, is the flagship among a number of other medieval buildings.
- Florence - It was the city of the Medici, merchants, Dante, Giotto, Donatello, Ghiberti, Della Robbia, Botticelli and Michelangelo and many other brilliant artists in various fields (literature, music, painting, sculpture). Even today, the standard form of the Italian language is based on the Tuscan dialect spoken in Florence. Anyone interested in the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Italy should make sure to visit Florence.
- Gubbio - This small Umbrian town, like the largest Tuscan city of Siena, is a medieval walled city located in the hills, and although it does not have single buildings as spectacular as the Palazzo Pubblico di Siena or the Duomo, its collection of buildings and physical location are very beautiful.
- Orvieto - Orvieto is a hilly medieval walled city with a splendid Gothic-style cathedral, with black and white stripes like the Duomo do Siena, with frescoes by Luca Signorelli inside.
- Perugia - Perugia is a walled city, which makes a visit rewarding for fans of the Gothic and early Renaissance in Italy. The central Piazza IV Novembre is embellished with the Fontana Maggiore, sculpted by the great early Gothic sculptor, Giovanni Pisano and bordered by the Gothic Cathedral (San Lorenzo) and the Palazzo dei Priori. These are just the most important highlights.
- Pienza - Redesigned according to a central plan in Gothic style in honor of Pope Pius II, who reigned from 1458 until his death in 1464; its historic center remains a living Gothic space and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Pisa - A medieval rival of Florence, it was defeated before Siena, but built the famous Campo dei Miracoli, with the Leaning Tower, the Duomo, the Baptistery and the Monumental Cemetery, and also the church of Santa Maria della Spina near the Arno .
- Priverno - Famous above all for the Abbey of Fossanova, a historically important building of the first Italian Gothic style, today the seat of a Cistercian monastery.
- Rome - Capital of the Papal State, where the Pope reigned with supreme authority both religious and political. Rome has many famous buildings from the Renaissance, including the Capitoline Hill and its palaces, which were designed by Michelangelo. But probably the most famous Renaissance work in Rome are frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, especially Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes, and those of Raphael and Fra Beato Angelico in the Vatican apartments. St. Peter's Basilica itself was conceived as a Renaissance building by Michelangelo, but its nave was lengthened by Carlo Maderno in the early 17th century, so the result is quite distinct from a Renaissance aesthetic.
- Saint Gimignano - San Gimignano is a very well preserved small medieval walled town, with great art preserved in its municipal museum, impressive churches and towers which are several hundred years old.
- Siena - Once a fiercely warrior, Siena was Florence's rival in the Gothic era, which is reflected in its architecture. Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (founded in 1472 with headquarters in the gothic Palazzo Salimbeni) is the oldest continuously operating bank in the world. Another medieval aspect of Siena is the Palio, which takes place twice a year, a horse race preceded by pomp and parades performed almost every year since the 12th century and since 1590 it has been limited to the Piazza del Campo, the most famous medieval square of the city.
- Spoleto - This ancient Roman city also features a beautiful Romanesque cathedral, among other medieval buildings.
- Urbino - The Palazzo Ducale, a Renaissance building, now home to the National Gallery of the Marche, with an important Renaissance collection.
southern Italy
- 4 Naples - Naples is famous for being an ancient Hellenistic and Roman city and for its 18th and 19th century institutions, such as the Teatro di San Carlo. However, it also has a number of medieval buildings, including Castel Nuovo (Male Angevin) from the 13th century, and the National Museum of Capodimonte, a large art museum whose collection also includes important Renaissance paintings.
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