Barefoot Boy Makes Good: A Study of Machiavelli's Historiography

Abstract

Like many old cities, Florence has made a pantheon of its streets. Some commemorate names so universal Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Galileo that any city would welcome them. Others, inevitably, belong to more local traditions and are apt to puzzle a stranger. One of these is the Via Michele di Lando, a short but impressively prosperous street just outside the Porta Romana, the great medieval city gate to the south. Michele was the leader of the Ciompi revolt of 1378, an insurrection of wool workers and small artisans; and here, amongst opulent nineteenth-century imitations of Renaissance palaces, the city chose to memorialize him a man whom Machiavelli pictures as leading the rabble barefoot, with scarcely anything upon him. As it happens, the Via Michele di Lando runs off the Viale Machiavelli, the broad avenue that climbs from the Porta Romana up to the beautiful views of the city we see from the hills. In this no doubt accidental connection there is a special sort of justice, for it was Machiavelli (through his nineteenth-century followers) who established the barefooted wool worker as a hero of the patria. In their own way, then, these streets are an emblem of Machiavelli's influence as a historian and may serve us as a point of departure for a study of the transformative power of his historical imagination. Michele was a figure out of Florence's own past. In the Discourses, where Rome was central, he went unmentioned. But in reworking the chronicles and histories of his own city to write his History of Florence, Machiavelli necessarily had to concern himself with scenes and events that were, in a sense, both new and deeply familiar. Here Michele emerged as a hero and occupied a central place. In immersing ourselves in Michele's story, we are