The spectacle of
ancient Rome and a familiarity with its leading writers were not
without influence; Giovanni Villani confesses that he received the
first impulse to his great work at the jubilee of the year 1300, and
began it immediately on his return home. Yet how many among the 200,000
pilgrims of that year may have been like him in gifts and tendencies
and still did not write the history of their native cities? For not all
of them could encourage themselves with the thought: 'Rome is sinking;
my native city is rising, and ready to achieve great things, and
therefore I wish to relate its past history, and hope to continue the
story to the present time, and as long as any life shall last.' And
besides the witness to its past, Florence obtained through its
historians something further a greater fame than fell to the lot of any
other city of Italy.
Our present task is not to write the history of this remarkable State,
but merely to give a few indications of the intellectual freedom and
independence for which the Florentines were indebted to this history.
In no other city of Italy were the struggles of political parties so
bitter, of such early origin, and so permanent. The descriptions of
them, which belong, it is true, to a somewhat later period, give clear
evidence of the superiority of Florentine criticism.
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