Italy’s Renaissance cradle is still the second-most-visited region
Tuscany covers 22,987 square kilometres with 3,659,222 people—Italy’s ninth-most populous and fifth-largest region—centred on Florence. Treated as birthplace of the Italian Renaissance and of literary Italian via Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, it ranks second only to Veneto for Italian travel, with seaside visits about 40 percent of Castiglione della Pescaia’s pull.
Roughly triangular, Tuscany is two-thirds hills, a quarter mountains and only 8.4 percent plain, most of it along the Arno, where Florence, Empoli and Pisa sit. Elba is the chief island of its offshore archipelago. Eight World Heritage listings range from Florence's centre, inscribed in 1982, to Montecatini Terme among Europe's great spa towns in 2021, and in 2018 Florence alone drew more than 5 million arrivals. Wines include Chianti, Brunello di Montalcino and Vernaccia di San Gimignano.
Bronze Age Apennine peoples traded with Minoan and Mycenaean Greece, and the Villanovan culture from about 900 BC is seen as the earliest phase of the Etruscans, whom the Romans called Tusci. Their civilisation, strongest in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, filled the land between the Arno and the Tiber before Rome absorbed it and founded Lucca, Pisa, Siena and Florence. After 572 the Lombards made Lucca their capital, and pilgrims on the Via Francigena later brought medieval wealth.
Guelph and Ghibelline rivalry split communes that each had a speciality: Pisa its port, Siena banking, Lucca banking and silk. The Black Death from 1348 eventually killed 70 percent of Tuscans. Florence bought Pisa in 1405 and Livorno in 1421, and from 1434 the Medici steered the republic, apart from the interlude under Savonarola and Soderini. Siena was absorbed in 1555, creating the Grand Duchy, while Lucca stayed independent until 1847.
When the Medici line died out with Gian Gastone in 1737, the duchy passed to the house of Lorraine, which ruled until a plebiscite joined Tuscany to the new Kingdom of Italy; Florence served as national capital from 1864 to 1870. Allied forces took almost the entire region in the summer of 1944, and centre-left coalitions have governed it since regional government began in 1970.
Source: Tuscany
