Of some of these cities remain the imposing ruins of the boundary walls and above all the necropolis that have provided us with important archeological finds, the only clues to help us understand the sophisticated civilisation of this people whose writing has never been completely deciphered. It often happens, even today, that while ploughing his fields a farmer turns up beautiful ceramics and intricate utensils, occasionally even temples or entire necropolis.

The subsequent Roman domination brought about two major developments for Tuscany: the foundation of its principle cities like Florence, Lucca, Pisa and Siena, and the development of an important network of roads that connected Rome to the northern provinces of the Empire. However, it was not until the end of the barbaric invasions that followed the fall of the Roman Empire and the expansion of the power of the Church during the tenth and eleventh centuries A.D. that Tuscany once again really prospered; this prosperity leading first to the development of important monasteries, fundamental for the preservation of and the handing down of the culture and science of the earlier centuries, and then to the birth of a communal way of life.

In the Tuscan cities, organised as free communes, and subsequently as republics, trade and economic life soon flourished again, thanks also to the entrepreneurship of men like Francesco Datini, successful merchant from Prato, who set up commercial links with the rest of Europe. This was of course reflected in the social and cultural life of the time.

Florence at that time held a position of such importance compared to the other Italian cities that its dialect, made noble by writers and poets of the fame of Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio and Francesco Petrarca, became accepted as the highest form of the Italian tongue. This was in fact the first step towards the birth of an idea of nation. Unfortunately in the centuries immediately following, the internal divisions and the bitter rivalries between the various Italian city-states made it easy for other European powers to dominate the Italian peninsula.

For the figurative arts it was also a period which saw important developments, thanks to public patronage, particularly that of the Church, that made it possible for artists such as Cimabue, Giotto and Duccio di Buoninsegna to dedicate themselves to their art. In architecture, between 1200 and 1300 the Gothic style with its typical ogival arch took the place of the Romanesque style that had marked the tenth and eleventh centuries. In Tuscany there are many marvellous examples of the Romanesque style such as the Cathedral of Pisa, the Baptistry of Florence, and San Miniato al Monte. There are also little architectural jewels like the small country churches, all built in the Romanesque style, known as “pievi”, or parish churches, evidence of the Roman Church’s widespread effort to colonize the Tuscan countryside and, moreover, of the notable development, even then, of agriculture in Tuscany. Most of these ‘pievi’ were built along the Via Francigena, an important junction that joined Rome to the north of Italy and from there to France via Lucca. The Gothic style, on the other hand, created imposing and beautiful buildings such as Santa Maria Novella, Santa Croce, Palazzo Vecchio and the Cathedral (Santa Maria del Fiore) of Florence; the Cathedral and the Town Hall in Siena and, nearby, the abbey of San Galgano, the first and purest example of Gothic in Tuscany.

Political life also evolved towards forms of democracy which were relatively advanced for that time, even if they were controlled exclusively first by the aristocracy and then by the merchant class. In Florence the first political parties of the modern era were born: the “Guelfi”, which, generalising somewhat, we can call an expression of the naiscent merchant bourgeoisie, who supported the Roman Church and its worldly power; and the “Ghibellini”, an expression of the aristocracy, who supported the Emperor in his fight to submit the Pope to his authority. Their fierce struggle, in which also the sublime Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, on the side of the Guelfi, found himself involved to the point of being exiled from Florence when their adversaries gained the upper hand, marked the history of Florence and of the other Tuscan cities from 1200 to 1400, giving rise to that phenomenon known as “campanilismo”, (literally, ‘belfryism’) because of the most powerful families’ attachment to their own towers, or belfries, built for defence but above all to indicate their prestige, clearly always greater than those of the rival families.

This sort of "race to the heavens" produced urban jewels like San Gimignano, the Manhattan of the Middle Ages, the city of one hundred towers, only some of which have survived intact, saved by a miracle from the destructive fury of the enemy families that destroyed them as soon as they defeated and exiled their rivals. Florence and Siena were also studded with tall towers, as is documented by the iconography of the time, unfortunately all razed to the ground by the ‘campanilistic’ disputes of their inhabitants.

But it was particularly in the fifteenth century that Florence began to look like the city of today that continues to enchant people the world over.

With the Medici family’s ascent to power and the subsequent expansion of their control over all the territory of the region, Tuscany, and in particular, Florence, became the cradle of modern civilisation and it was here that Man finally acquired, perhaps for the first time in his history, a central position in the universe. After centuries of barbaric invasions, after the long period of what we today call the Dark Ages, during which the Roman Church kept a very tight rein on customs, fashions, and individual freedom, finally a new wind, fertile, regenerating, bursting with creativity and change, started to blow right here in Florence. A wind called “humanism”. Under the guiding hand and with the encouragement of enlightened noblemen and dreamers like Lorenzo de’ Medici, “il Magnifico” (the Magnificent), poet, philosopher, patron of the arts as well as a politician by breeding, Florence experienced, between 1400 and 1500, a marvellous period of expansion. The rich and powerful Florentine families, merchants who traded with every corner of the world, bankers who lent money to half the kings of Europe, competed with each other, just as they had always done, in a climate of creative fervour to erect this time not towers, but ever larger buildings and gardens, private churches and country villas, surrounding themselves with the best architects, sculptors, painters, and craftsmen to beautify their homes and to make them more sumptuous and more glorious than those of the rival families. Emblematic of this competitive atmosphere were the words of the Pitti family, Florentine bankers and envious rivals of the Strozzi family, the latter having just finished the splendid building that still bears their name in the centre of the city: “We will build a palace whose windows will be as large as your doors”. Thus was born the magnificent Palazzo Pitti begun by Brunelleschi and finished by Ammannati, and the adjacent garden of Boboli designed by Tribolo. Unfortunately this immense undertaking left the Pitti family bankrupt, to the enormous joy of the Medici, who bought the building, and had Vasari build a long raised corridor that, passing over Ponte Vecchio, joined Palazzo Vecchio and the Uffizi to Palazzo Pitti on the opposite bank of the Arno river.

The perspective "fuga" of the Uffizi museum with at the end the Arnolfo Tower and Palazzo Vecchio, seen from the river, represent together with Pienza, of which we will speak later on, perhaps the largest and most enlightened example in Italy of Renaissance town-planning.

In fact “Renaissance” is precisely the word used by Vasari himself who, apart from being an architect, was, like almost all the artists of his time, also a painter, sculptor and, in his fascinating book “Le Vite” (The Lives), an observant reporter. This book is a series of biographies of the most important contemporary artists and intellectuals, essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the history of Florence of that time.

The city, thanks to the work of such wonderful artists as Michelangelo, Donatello, Beato Angelico, Masaccio, Botticelli, Brunelleschi, Leonardo da Vinci, Alberti, Ghiberti etc., was transformed into the jewel it is, heritage of all humanity. In the centuries since, this quality has repeatedly saved it from the destructive fury of war, as every time, just as it seemed to be on the point of being destroyed, its marvels have moved the invaders to spare it. A perfect example of this is the case of Ponte Vecchio, saved in 1944 from the war when all the other bridges of the city were blown up by the retreating German troops.

Brunelleschi’s cupola is also still there, after five hundred years, “Such a high stucture, it towers over the heavens, and casts a shadow so large that it covers each and every one of the inhabitants of Tuscany”, as the other great Florentine architect, Leon Battista Alberti, described it. It seems to want to compete with the garland of hills which encircles the city, as Vasari again noted: “standing so high that the hills around Florence look smaller”. The dynamics of its construction are still in part unclear to the architects of today, but in any case the building of this immense structure symbolised for Florence its final victory over the other Tuscan cities.

The Leaning Tower of Pisa too is still standing. Next to it, in the Cathedral, the great Pisan scientist, Galileo Galilei, with his acute observations on the swinging of the lantern hanging from the cupola, at the beginning the 1600s revolutionised the history of science, of philosophy, of religion, of Man. His ideas were in such contrast with the doctrine of the contemporary Church that he risked being burned at the stake for heresy. Only the forced public repudiation of his own theories and the intervention of the Grand Duke Cosimo II de’ Medici, who had grasped the revolutionary significance of Galileo’s theories, saved him from the Inquisition.

From the second half of the sixteenth century, after the fall of Siena, the history of Florence and that of the rest of Tuscany coincided. The only exception was that the Tuscan countryside subsequently underwent, during the 1700s, a profound change that brought it closer to the gentle aspect that we all admire today.

In 1737, after the fall of the dynasty of the Medici family, the region was handed over to the Lorena family, Austrian nobles related to the Hapsburgs. Under the leadership of the Grand-Duke Francesco I, who, intrigued by the new enlightened ideas developing at that time in Europe, fostered important reforms, and subsequently under that of Leopold II, who governed wisely until 1859, when Tuscany became part of the Reign of Italy, with Florence as its capital for ten years until the capture of Rome, the region lived through a period of profound transformation, becoming perhaps the most modern and advanced state of Europe. It was, for example, the first state to abolish the death penalty.

The Lorena family took to heart the problems of agriculture, favouring a modern and rational set-up. Besides a series of measures such as the canalisation of the watercourses, reforestation, and the development of the road network, Tuscany took two great steps forward under the good government of the Lorena: the reclamation of the vast southern coastal area, swampy and infested with malaria, today known as Maremma, and the introduction of the “mezzadria”, or sharecropping, or, in other words, the division of the harvest between the landowner and the peasant.

For the first time the peasant could make use of a part of what he produced and could also earn some money. And this, even if it in fact made him even more than before a “slave of the earth”, meant the end of the medieval practice of serfdom, previously abolished in name only.

In the Tuscan countryside this important land reform led to real revolution. The countryside, which at that time was still largely uncultivated, was rapidly and heavily colonised, with the consequent development of a vast network of rural homes, the farmhouses that still today adorn the Tuscan hills. The peasant families hungry for work abandoned the huts in which they had lived around the castles and the parish churches, to wrestle from the woods a piece of land and cultivate it. Not an easy task if one considers the morphology of Tuscany and the constitution of its earth, made of stone rather than of soil. However, it was these stones that were used to construct the terraces which dot the hillsides and which serve to cultivate the earth, as well as all those beautiful houses that today are the dream of the newly rich the world over, after being abandoned by the farmers after the second world war, when working the land no longer paid. In only a few years the countryside was depopulated, the houses left empty, despoiled, reduced to ruins, the peasants transformed into factory workers in the economic boom of the sixties.

Fortunately the newly rich, recognising a good business deal, flocked to Tuscany from all over the world: it is thanks to them that this marvellous architectural heritage was saved from certain ruin, and that, newly restored, it has now become the focal point of a new rebirth of Tuscany, linked to the beauty of its landscape, to its wine, oil, ‘pecorino’ (sheep’s cheese) and to all the pleasures of Tuscan cuisine.

The English were among the first, followed only later by the Americans, to buy and renovate the farmhouses; in fact, as so many of them, including the rock-star Sting, now live in Chianti, the Tuscans have recently, tongue-in-cheek, nicknamed the region “Chiantishire”.