Grand Tour

The activity of the factories is what ensured the long-term prosperity of the Florentine economy. It was not just the cloth mills that were important but also the potteries (Doccia, Ginori) and the workshops specializing in semiprecious stone.

Lucca was universally acclaimed as the most industrious city precisely for its production and commerce of valuable Oriental fabrics (damasks, light silks, canopies) and what were known as Ganges, Cathay and Georgian silks. For many, indeed, the epithet of “industrious Lucca” went beyond the willingness of its population to work hard and embraced an authentic cult of republican freedoms. Among many others, Georg Friedrich Martini (1727-45) left us, in the middle of the 18th century, invaluable descriptions and analytical and vivid drawings of Luccan looms and the systems used for the manufacture of cloth.

A. C. Valéry (1828) described the working of semiprecious stone as a celebrated and thriving Florentine industry which had produced the panels in Palazzo Pitti, the large octagonal table in the Uffizi and the Medici Chapel. An industry that had always been supported by the grand duke, working for him alone and apparently always worthy of his reputation.

Very great interest was shown in the banking system of Livorno, in direct connection with the remittance of funds to British merchants and the letters of credit used by travelers. Other Tuscan banks were often accused of a certain lethargy by travelers, who pointed out that “when money stays in the coffers” the economy inevitably stagnates.

The fleeting reference to the industries of Florence made by Evelyn in 1644, when he described a visit to its silk, damask and velvet factories («which are said to bring revenues to the city in the form of taxes in the order of two million gold crowns a year»),painted a florid picture of the state of commerce that no longer tallied, a century later, with the low level of affluence recorded by travelers. In fact Smollett found a compromised situation in the 1760s (« though Florence be tolerably populous, there seems to be very little trade of any kind in it»), in which all the commercial activities seemed destined to grind to a halt and the only source of income on which the inhabitants relied was the one that came, indirectly, from the residence of the grand dukes in the region and from meeting their needs. A part in this evident decline, in the second half of the 18th century, was also played by the progressive exhaustion of the Medicean dynasty (with the death of Gian Gastone in 1737 and of his wife in 1742, leaving no children). In fact thirty years later Young, faced with the splendid beauty of the city and, in contrast, the listlessness of its economy, declared his amazement at the way that the Medici, ruling over a mountainous region with no more than a million inhabitants, had been able to accumulate such an extraordinary range of achievements that what had been put together by the Bourbons, ruling about twenty million subjects for eight hundred years, could not bear comparison with them.