Grand Tour

Many visitors chose to linger in the environs of the city, attracted by the panoramas and the oases of greenery. The city was not always clearly distinguished from its surroundings, for example by paragraphs dedicated to the passage from one to the other, as if travelers perceived it as a continuum. Not coincidentally it has been said that what made the urban context of Florence unique was «a countryside into which the city extended without a break, in forms linked to agriculture and rural recreation rather than to the commerce and handicrafts that predominated inside the walls; it was an area that depended on the city market and was inhabited by persons of property who had their own residences in the city» (Conti, 1983).
Among the most favored of these localities was Fiesole, Florence’s “cradle” (Valéry, 1828) or “mother” (Deseine, 1699, an unnatural mother who destroyed her child). Dante claimed the town had been founded by the Etruscans, Boccaccio set the Decameron on its slopes and in Politian’s writings it is linked to praise of Medici hospitality. It was this august literary tradition that determined the town’s popularity, making it an object of veneration among 19th-century travelers: “it was on the slopes of Fiesole facing the city that the most fortunate built their residences, and cultivated those gardens in which they sought to express their ideas about the nature of Tuscany or the Renaissance, or their vision of all this” (Conti, 1983). The monastery of San Francesco was often cited.
Other places that feature in the accounts are the Certosa, the Carthusian monastery of Florence founded by Nicola Acciaioli and built by Orcagna; the village of San Casciano with the nearby villa that used to belong to Machiavelli; and Certaldo, immortalized by Boccaccio.