Tuscany historical timeline

Origins

The region takes its name from the Etruscans, whose civilisation flourished here between roughly the 8th and 3rd centuries BC -- Roman Tuscia and Etruria both refer to them. Their loose league of cities included Volterra, Arezzo, Cortona, Chiusi, and Populonia, and their work in drainage, metalworking, and religious practice was absorbed by Rome rather than erased by it. Roman colonies followed: Florentia was founded on the Arno in 59 BC, Lucca's Roman street grid and amphitheatre outline survive in the modern city, and Pisa served as a port.

Turning points

What made Tuscany distinctive was the medieval failure of any single power to control it. From the 11th century its cities governed themselves as comuni and spent three hundred years competing. Pisa built a Mediterranean maritime empire and lost it at the naval Battle of Meloria in 1284 against Genoa. Siena defeated Florence at Montaperti in 1260, then was halted permanently by the Black Death of 1348 -- the reason its Gothic core survives so intact, and why the enormous nave it had begun for its cathedral was abandoned and still stands unfinished. Florence, financed by wool and by the florin it began minting in 1252, outlasted them all.

Influential people

Matilda of Canossa, margravine of Tuscany until 1115, made the region pivotal in the papacy's struggle with the Holy Roman Empire. Three centuries later the Medici converted banking profits into political control and then into patronage, under Cosimo the Elder and Lorenzo the Magnificent. Cosimo I was made Grand Duke in 1569; the male line ended in 1737 and the grand duchy passed to the Austrian Habsburgs, who held it -- with a Napoleonic interruption -- until unification. Grand Duke Peter Leopold abolished capital punishment here in November 1786, the first sovereign state anywhere to do so -- still marked each 30 November as the Festa della Toscana.

Cultural evolution

Because Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio wrote in the Florentine vernacular, the Tuscan dialect became the basis of standard Italian; the Accademia della Crusca, founded in Florence in 1583, still functions as the language's reference authority. Tuscany joined the Kingdom of Italy after the plebiscite of 1860, and Florence served as the national capital from 1865 to 1871. The 20th century was harder: the Gothic Line ran across the northern Apennines in 1944, bringing months of front-line fighting and civilian massacres such as Sant'Anna di Stazzema, and the Arno flood of 4 November 1966 damaged an enormous quantity of Florentine art and archives.

Present-day significance

Rural depopulation after the collapse of the old sharecropping system emptied much of the countryside in the mid-20th century; from the 1970s the same farmhouses were bought and restored, and the landscape acquired a second economy based on being looked at. That is the region's present tension -- a countryside valued for appearing unchanged, and towns whose historic centres are increasingly expensive for the people who would otherwise live in them.