Prepositional City: Spatial Practice and Micro-Neighborhood in Renaissance Florence

Abstract

The famous Florentine tax census, the Catasto, contains an element that has escaped organized scholarly attention. This is the confini: bare-bones lists of neighbors by which householders identified the location of private property to government officials. This article exploits the confini to expose the microscopic connective fibers of spatial relationships that citizens reproduced every day at the level of individual streets, piazze, and buildings. Laying bare these elusive, ephemeral processes reveals how Florentines, like the inhabitants of other premodern European centers, conceived, articulated, and produced notions of urban space amid the structures and mundane rhythms of everyday life.

Senses of Space in the Early Modern World

“…Locals and visitors would create a city by foot that was more personal and sensory than the map they might hold in their hand. These spaces were relational and defined even in official documents by who lived here and who worked there; this was what Nicholas Eckstein described as the "prepositional city" where we locate a house by its neighbors on either side and the nearby corner rather than by a number (Eckstein 2018). But more than a building, we locate the house as a group of residents known by their relations with neighbors and the moving life of the street.…”