Florence on foot: an eye‐level mapping of the early modern city in time of plague

Abstract As plague approached in August 1630, Florence's health officials commissioned the aristocratic lay brothers of the confraternity of the Archangel Michael (‘San Michele’) to search the city's streets and alleys for signs of disease. While the extraordinary record of this ‘Visitation’ is known to health historians, the present article instead relates it to a long history of urban surveys and censuses in which Florentines fashioned themselves in intimate relation to the physical spaces and places of the urban environment. In August 1630 this process of mental mapping produced a malodorous inversion of the patriotic visions we popularly associate with the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. Florence emerges in the Visitation as a nightmare city drowning in ordure, suffocating on its own fumes and leaking like a sieve. Spatial intimacy, usually associated with notions of productive neighbourhood sociability and community, appears here as an existential threat. Meanwhile, San Michele's fratelli were forced to balance genuine Christian compassion for the suffering men and women whom they were pledged to assist with long‐standing suspicion of the poor, both as a class and as the potential vectors of pestilence.