Cities have always been surrounded by walls. Walls don’t have just one face, or represent any one particular season. Over time they changed, though, and continue today to dot our urban landscapes, remnants from days gone by but monumental nonetheless.
Not long before the Renaissance, the walls in Florence expanded dramatically to keep up with population growth in one of the most settled areas in Europe, where at the time one in three citizens was Italian.
It is important to see walls like this today: not as piles of stone that need to be flanked, stones that exclude, that designate an inside and an outside. Rather, see them like the thin walls of a living organ that move with the demographic palpitations beneath it. Or, see them as curtains that swell with the wind blowing through Florence.