PALMER: Yeah, so there's two things that protect Florence. One of them, the intelligent choice of an extremely smart woman, and the other the aftermath of its successful propaganda.
One is that when the Medici family, who eventually rise from being merchant elites to being dukes and conquering the city themselves, rule it up until the 18th century, and then when the last Medici has no heir, she writes a will leaving all of the art to the city, on condition that it never leave the city. Which means that whenever there's an economic tumult, Siena will sell a painting to pay for a short-term emergency. Milan will sell a painting to take care of a short-term emergency. Florence cannot. And so in the sense of entail, this stuff can't leave Florence and can't be sold off. So Florence keeps it.
And in the coming crises of the 19th century and the 20th century, all of the other Italian cities lose some of their masterpieces. Florence keeps almost everything and becomes the place you have to go on the Grand Tour. So, because it turns into the place you have to go on a tour, it would be the ultimate barbarism to harm Florence.
And so Florence is treated with kid gloves by every side in every war because of the idea that it would be horrifying to harm Florence. So the Allied bombers were not allowed to bomb Florence, despite it being a major city. And there's only one bombing raid and it's a daylight raid. Normally bombing is at night. There’s one incredibly dangerous daylight raid just to take out the train station. They're not allowed to hit anything else.
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Because Florence is more protected and more of its art survives, it looks like it always had more art. And so we believe it always had more art and then we study it more and then there are more books and exhibits about it and then more people visit it and then it gains more cachet and this cycle goes on and on.
There's also a lot of history through Florence because its paper archives survive with every receipt for candle wax and 30 million pages of documents survive from just the financing of building the cathedral. There are whole language groups and cultures for which we don't have a tenth that much documentation for their whole existence at the same time period. Florence's paper survives. Why? Because nobody ever burned Florence because you would be a barbarian if you did.
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KRUGMAN: Yeah, I like the story about how Florence was the wool capital, but the wool was coming from England. England had lots of sheep, but to make wool that doesn't itch like hell, you need olive oil.
PALMER: You need the fine spray of olive oil which allows the flyaways, little tiny sticky outy fibers, to get wrapped back into the thread. And so in the Middle Ages when the seas are full of pirates and the ships are of lesser quality and you have lots of bandits on the roads, you just keep your ships at home and you make itchy wool and you're itchy.
Once the economy reconstructs a bit and things stabilize enough and finance is big enough, people will gamble, “Well, pirates might attack the ship, but it might make it.” It's more profitable to sell your raw wool to a Mediterranean power, which can then use the masses of olive oil to process that wool, produce high quality, lightweight, smooth, itch-less wool and sell it back to you four or five times the price per yard as the best you could possibly get for the low quality wool you could produce at home if you can't get a hold of the olive oil.
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Once people decided to revive antiquity, and had this obsession with the Pax Romana, that's what they're imagining. They're not imagining as we do in our Hollywood dramas, Caligula and Tiberius and the fun and corrupt emperors with their orgies, right? That's what we usually imagine. They are imagining The Pax Romana: that hundred years under the five good gay emperors: Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, which are the only recorded patch of extended peace in all of Italy's history and the only time when there were no bandits on the roads and no pirates on the seas [...]
From the interview:
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