The boy who became a duke

In the middle of this square a man sits on horseback in bronze, calm and upright, on the spot where Florence voted on war and peace for centuries.

After Lorenzo, things went wrong for the family. They were driven out of the city in 1494, came back, left again, and returned in 1530 behind the troops of the emperor and the pope. The young duke they got then was murdered seven years later by a distant cousin, after which the city elite pulled a seventeen-year-old boy from a side branch of the family, convinced they could steer him.

Within a year Cosimo had beaten his opponents and moved the government into his own rooms, and thirty years later the pope gave him the title of Grand Duke of Tuscany. Giambologna cast this statue in 1594, when the republic survived only in the memory of old men, and around the base run scenes celebrating his coronation.

We walk on toward the facade of the town hall and the door beneath the tower.