The first time I came to Florence was as a teenager, travelling with a friend. Quite by accident, we found ourselves in front of the Duomo on Easter Sunday with the dove whizzing toward the piazza and exploding before our eyes. It was love at first sight. I went on to complete a doctorate in Renaissance history and, ever since doing my Fulbright here, have been living in this city continuously for the past two decades.
The paradox of the Florentine Renaissance is endlessly fascinating to me. It was a time of exquisite beauty, rediscovery of the classical world and cultural rebirth: all the clichés. And yet, at the same time, daily life was gritty, a struggle for survival. Just think how the Black Death took place not way back in the Dark Ages, but at the threshold of the Renaissance, ushering in the world of Donatello, Brunelleschi and Leonardo. There was an explosion of such exuberant talent and all of them competing to outdo one another. How did all this happen here? It still stuns me.
I am addicted to archival research. People think it’s boring to stare at dusty old documents day after day—not true! Once a colleague working beside me in the archive was reading a document about the execution of a red-bearded man and, as he turned the page, a fluff of red hair tumbled out. Another time, it was finding a swatch of Eleonora di Toledo’s dress pinned to a document. Never knowing when history is going to jump off the page at you this way is thrillingly addictive. My mentor, the great Gene Brucker, used to say it was a disease called “archivitis”, and once you catch it, you never recover.
As a kind of professional eavesdropper, I love listening in on the conversations of people during this era. This is why I titled my last book Voices from the Italian Renaissance. I especially like to read their notebooks, personal journals where they tell stories, make doodles and essentially spill the beans about everything from religion to politics to sex.
If I could meet one Renaissance Florentine, it would definitely be Niccolò Machiavelli. Leaving to one side his complex views on political philosophy, which are fascinating, Machiavelli would have been great to hang out with. He was a Florentine to the core. You see this in his personal correspondence, which is by turns filthy, insulting, laugh-out-loud funny, but always smart and, at moments, surprisingly tender.
I will be sharing many stories about love, marriage and sex in Renaissance Florence, drawn from my original research, in a series of seminars at The British Institute later this month. Each week we will be digging through archival documents, including tax records, private letters, inquisitorial depositions and legal transcripts that permit an incredibly close look at people’s daily lives: a Florentine gentlewoman writes a letter to her son indulgently commenting on his affair with an enslaved woman; a Sienese preacher thunders from the pulpit about married couples practicing sodomy; in Venice, the daughter of a gondolier testifies in court about domestic abuse; to get a tax break, a Florentine merchant declares his multiple bastard children; a nun from Pescia pretends to be a saint while having lesbian relations. And there’s so much more… Join me, we will have a lot of fun!
Love, Marriage and Sex in Renaissance Florence starts on Tuesday, May 27, 2025. Read more here.
