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Florence: The city that changed the World

by AEDO Media

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Latest episodes

  • Andrea del Verrocchio: The Master History Defamed

    August 14, 2026 · 10 min

    There's a story everyone tells about him: a master saw his student's angel, dropped his brush, and never painted again. It's a great story. It's also probably not true. Andrea del Verrocchio ran the busiest workshop in Florence, mixing…

  • Raphael Sanzio: The Genius Florence Helped Create

    August 13, 2026 · 12 min

    He arrived in Florence at twenty-one, an outsider from a small city, carrying nothing but a letter asking the head of the government to be kind to him. Leonardo da Vinci was already a legend. Michelangelo had just unveiled the David. There…

  • Botticelli: The Painter The Renaissance Forgot

    August 12, 2026 · 12 min

    He painted the most reproduced image in art history, and spent his final years convinced it was a sin. Sandro Botticelli went from painting the hanged bodies of traitors on a government wall to painting a goddess rising from the sea…

  • Michelangelo: The Man Who Never Signed His Own Words

    August 11, 2026 · 11 min

    He signed only one work in his entire career, a marble Pietà finished at twenty-four. He spent forty years on a tomb that shrank from a monument with dozens of statues down to a single wall panel. He was forced onto his back for four years…

  • Donatello: The Master Michelangelo Never Met

    August 10, 2026 · 12 min

    Everyone has heard the name. Almost no one stops long enough to actually learn the story behind it. Donatello never had the fame Michelangelo, Leonardo and the generation that came after him would go on to enjoy, and it never seems to have…

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  • Lorenzo Ghiberti: The Hands No One Remembers

    August 9, 2026 · 9 min

    Two men entered a competition that would decide who got to build the most important doors in Florence. One of them won, wrote down exactly how it happened, and stayed graceful about it. History remembers the other one as the genius, thanks…

  • Dante Alighieri: The Poet Who Sent Florence to Hell

    August 9, 2026 · 12 min

    Florence exiled its most famous son and sentenced him to burn if he ever came back. He answered by writing florentines into Hell, by name, in the poem that would define the Italian language forever. Dante Alighieri lost the city he loved…

  • Giorgio Vasari: The Invisible Architect

    August 9, 2026 · 11 min

    For nearly five hundred years, the word historians use for the explosion of art and ambition we call the Renaissance belongs to a man who invented it, almost as an afterthought. He sat with Michelangelo and wrote down what he heard, then…

  • Ponte Vecchio: The City That Continues

    April 15, 2026 · 10 min

    The Ponte Vecchio has stood for nearly seven hundred years. It survived the floods that destroyed it and forced it to be rebuilt. It survived the Second World War — the only bridge in Florence left standing when the Germans destroyed all…

  • Boboli Gardens: The City Seen From Above

    April 14, 2026 · 8 min

    The Medici built it to dominate nature. Nature had other plans. In 1549, Eleonora de Toledo commissioned a garden on the hillside behind the Palazzo Pitti. The architects were given a simple brief: turn a steep, unruly slope into a…

  • Palazzo Pitti: The Palace That Outlived Everyone

    April 13, 2026 · 9 min

    Luca Pitti wanted a palace larger than the Medici's. He got it. Then lost everything — including the palace. In 1458, one of Florence's most powerful bankers commissioned a residence on the other side of the Arno designed to dwarf anything…

  • Uffizi Gallery: The Office That Became the World

    April 12, 2026 · 10 min

    In 1560, Cosimo I de' Medici wanted to solve an administrative problem. The government of Florence was scattered across the city, and he wanted it in one place. He called Giorgio Vasari. He asked for an office building. What he got…

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About the show

Sometime between the 13th and 16th centuries, a small city on the banks of the Arno River decided—without knowing it was deciding—to change the world. Florence produced Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Dante, and Machiavelli. It invented the Renaissance, created the modern banking system, and exported ideas that are still present in everything you see and use today. This series tells that story, with the depth of a documentary and the pacing of a literary narrative. Every great story has an address. And this world began here.