To European travelers today, the urban form of the piazza in Italy connotes a zone of relaxation: deliberate strolls, ambitious rests, determined sunbathing, engaging entertainment. Visitors of Florence can spend the day meandering through dozens of these zones that were evolutionarily linked together over several hundred years, enjoying the range of architectural styles brought together in unified urban volumes. Now areas of respite within the dense urban network, in the early days of the piazza during the Renaissance in Italy, it was a location of much urban activity: news, punishment, rallies, exchange. As the widely considered origin of the Italian Renaissance, Florence offers several narratives of how mindsets evolved about curating urban space in ways that exemplified and influenced the Renaissance.

Although still very much rooted in the dominance of the church and the king based on its proximity to both institutions, the urban prominence of the piazza spoke to an increasingly civic mindset, one in which institutional power became more peripheral. While perhaps still somewhat influential, those institutions were not the only economic and political drivers. What is known as the Renaissance popularized in Florence because of a rising population of a wealthy merchant class, unattracted to medieval religiosity and fascinated by the city’s Roman ruins. This new rise of influence from a population not associated directly with either the church or the king provided a check on those previously unchecked powers. The merchant class could also employ artists and thinkers that weren’t constrained by particular agendas of religion or politics.

One of the first public spaces identified as being of the Renaissance in Florence is the Piazza Annunciata. Framed by the medieval Church of Santissima Annunziata and Brunelleschi’s Foundling Hospital, Piazza Annunciata manifests a Renaissance spatial conception that uses the orientation and relationship between buildings as compositional fodder. The Foundling Hospital is often considered to be the first built project of the Renaissance and offers the exterior condition of an arcade opening up on the piazza. The opportunity for extending public space into the spatial void of surrounding structures creates occupying transition zones as a way to unify disparate space through movement. Flanked by arcades on three sides, Piazza Annunciata shows how these in-between spaces work to expand the zone of public occupation and create hospitable environments for pause and exchange.

Although these occasioned places of urban activity were not a new phenomena in the urban landscape, they did show shifting socio-cultural dynamics by their evolving uses. Many Italian piazzas extended back in time to the medieval city; locations of open urban space often emerged due to an entry passage for a church and/or town hall. These natural gathering spaces for pre-function and procession also took on identities as markets associated with the activities of such institutions. For example, Florence’s Piazza della Signatoria was a medieval creation, little changed physically by the tenets of the Renaissance. However, as open space began to aspire for a sense of purposeful and limited directionality, the way in which space was occupied and developed over time evolved.

Seldomly do social conditions change overnight and the piazza can’t be forgotten as an entity still in dialogue with the dominance of church and the ruling elite even while a locus of new civic engagement. Often organization of piazzas was manipulated according to a point along the axial directionality, providing viewsheds between those reminders of institutions of civil society. The relationship of spatial organization in the Piazza Annunciata played into an implicit church-state connection linking the entry of Santissima Annunziata to the street beyond through an equestrian statue placed on the axial center in 1608. Similarly, at Florence’s older Piazza della Signatoria, an equestrian statue of Cosimo Medici placed on axis with the feeder streets offered a message of implicit connection and reliance between the luxury of the surrounding palazzos and movement through the urban fabric.

Aside from their political ideations, piazzas also embodied aesthetic tenets of the Renaissance. New fetishization of perspectival views in drawing and painting spread to urban design in the three dimensional world. Work by artists like Giotto who meticulously recreated urban perspectival experience contributed to a general aesthetic gravitation towards creating order and meaning in public space. By facilitating perspectival views to visual points of interest - monuments, buildings, piazzas provided desirable locations to occupy and experience volumetric enclosure, while spatially offering a place of pause. The ability to step back and perceive oblique building perspectives gave a new embodiment to the power of the built environment. Contemporary viewers can only imagine how formidable structures like the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio at Piazza della Signatoria would seem from these previously untended oblique angles.

Visual composition and unity were other components of evolving ideas about spatial occupation during the Renaissance. Composition of difference within unifying elements such as the arcade became a hallmark of Renaissance spatial perception, as seen in the evolution in the plans of Piazza Annunciata from 1427 to 1629 iterations. By collecting inhabitants coming from different streets/buildings and redistributing them, traffic of all varieties filled in to the piazza as space for interaction and discourse.

Precisely because of proximity to institutions of church and state and its habit of use as a marketplace of goods and services, the nature of the piazza as a public place became even more firmly established. The “Renaissance spirit” of discourse focused on order and directionality flourished in the Florentine piazzas.