Big Piero,the Empire of the Meadow,and the Parish of Santa Lucia

Abstract

If neighborhood territories and networks reflected the strategies and lived experience of the wealthy and the powerful in Florence, they also were shaped and reshaped from below. Paying particular attention to the symbolic imagining and enactment of neighborhood in sixteenth-century Florence, this article traces the festive expressions of artisan communities in the form of “kingdoms” tied to local social worlds of parish, church, street, and occupation. It argues that expressions of solidarity—which involved both exclusion and inclusion—helped establish the political identity and rights of those communities in the civic realm and provided a basis for claims about the obligations of rulers and the powerful.