ABSTRACT
Cities are at the heart of European history – or certainly were in the late Middle Ages, in particular in Italy. In the early middle ages, Italian cities were important centres for the preservation of culture (Wickham 2005: 591–692). In Italy, uniquely perhaps, the evidence speaks for itself. Through their buildings and their art, and the studies devoted to them by historians of art and architecture, demography and the urban economy, the cities of late medieval Italy great and small are able to appeal to us still. Not that the distinction of greater and smaller counts for much in the year 2015, when Siena, Pisa, Perugia, Gubbio, Assisi and San Gimignano are as much suffocated by international tourism as Rome, Florence, and Venice, with all of Italy’s medieval cities equally afflicted for the simple reason that they are what they are, the impotent custodians of medieval Italy’s art and architecture.
