🇮🇹 Italy
Florence
Florence (Firenze in Italian — population 362,000 in the city, 1 million in the metropolitan area — the capital of Tuscany and one of the most culturally significant cities in the world) is the city where the Renaissance was born: the 15th-century explosion of artistic, architectural and intellectual achievement that transformed European civilization began in Florence, under the patronage of the Medici family (the Florentine banking dynasty whose financial power funded the greatest concentration of artistic talent in history). The Uffizi Gallery (the most important gallery of Italian Renaissance painting in the world, containing works by Botticelli (the Birth of Venus, the Primavera), Leonardo da Vinci (the Annunciation), Michelangelo (the Doni Tondo), Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio and Giotto), the Accademia (the museum where Michelangelo's David (1501–1504) stands — the marble figure 5.17m tall that is the definitive Western sculpture of the ideal human form), the Duomo (the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore with Brunelleschi's dome (1436) — the largest masonry dome ever built, without centering, using a double-shell construction technique that Brunelleschi invented and kept secret), and the Ponte Vecchio (the 14th-century bridge over the Arno covered with jewelers' shops — the only bridge in Florence not destroyed by the retreating German army in 1944 (following Hitler's personal orders, according to the German commander who was present)) make Florence the most concentrated collection of masterpieces in the world per square kilometer. No city of comparable size has produced such a disproportionate contribution to the history of human civilization: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Galileo, Amerigo Vespucci, and the Medici family were all Florentine or made Florence their primary base.