Travel to Italy: Florence: Panorama: Photo 1

 In English the city is "Florence," in Italian it's "Firenze," but to the Romans who built a town here at the head of navigation on the Arno, it was "Florentia." In the second century, the city had a population of perhaps 10,000, but by the sixth it had only one thousand.  Steady growth saw the population rise to 2,500 in the eighth century, 20,000 in the 11th, 30,000 in the 12th, 45,000 in the 13th, and 90,000 in the fourteenth.  Mid-century, the plague cut the population in half, and Florence's population didn't reach 90,000 again for another 500 years. During the 19th century, the city more than doubled, to 200,000.

The Ponte Vecchio--the "old bridge"--has just about seen it all.  Rebuilt in the 12th century from Roman origins, it survived the 1945 retreat of the Nazis, who blew every other bridge in town but left the Ponte Vecchio out of cultural respect.  The tidy upper story is the Corridoio Vasariano, which connects the Pitti Palace, on the other side of the river, with the Uffizi, which (as the name suggests) was once an office building, for  Florentine officials.  This picture was taken from one of the windows in the museum that now occupies most of the Uffizi.

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