City space and urban experience at the end of the Italian Renaissance

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This project aims to study how people lived in early-modern cities, using health records. In 1630, health officials ordered a door-to-door survey of every poor household in plague-stricken Florence. The surviving reports of this extraordinary ‘Visitation’ are a time-capsule of urban experience, which seldom leaves any written trace. This project will mine the Visitation to reveal how citizens moved through public streets and private spaces; and use their own words to bring back to life their sensory impressions. The resulting study is expected to reveal how contemporary thinking about the city arose from patterns of everyday behaviour.