Florence : a portrait

"Delacroix - Donatello - Michelangelo - Strozzi family - Medicis - Venice - Surveys the physical evolution of the city over the years from the late sixteenth century - Considers some if its' chief personalities."@en
"In Dante, exiled from Florence in 1321, Levey finds an inspired guide to the city's thirteenth-century appearance, people, culture, and constitution, and a wrathful commentator on the politics that had fouled "l'ovil di San Giovanni," the "St. John's sheepfold" of his youth. Florence conjures this time of momentous activity, epitomized by the building of the Palazzo of the Priors, the crowning castle of the Palazzo Vecchio, whose tawny-yellow, crenelated tower trumpets Florence's colossal civic pride. Against the bloody background of struggles for power between Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, Levey shows us Florence nonetheless becoming a commercial power in which the crafts and guilds made way for the great Renaissance blossoming of la citta del fiore."