Addressing Wealth in Renaissance Florence

Abstract

This article uses a source well known to historians (the Florentine tax census of 1427—the catasto) to carry out minute analysis of wealth, residence and occupation patterns in one working-class neighborhood, the gonfalone of the Green Dragon. The article demonstrates the gradations of wealth and occupational status that could occur within a relatively small urban area; thereafter it scrutinizes details beyond the scope of most similar studies for this period, at the level of the individual city block. At such high levels of magnification, the city appears as a complex entity that cannot be accommodated to standard generalizations that attempt to describe the ecology of the city as a whole. While it examines data from a single year, the article also reveals the information contained in the catasto as the product of historical change, and argues for further interdisciplinary study that may further enhance our knowledge of life within Florence's myriad, overlapping microcommunities.