Town and Country

During the free weekend our class had, we decided to travel to Florence to visit some major tourist sights and along our way discovered more about how their economy functions. 

Over our two days in Florence we got to see some notable historical sights, like the Duomo temple, as well as meeting with a sustainable fabric worker from Italy who reuses fabrics in attempt to create a more sustainable environment during our traveling down from Cavalese to Florence. This leads me to discuss our article about town and country in early Italy, and how larger markets and smaller markets interacted with one another. 

Our article pointed out how after the Black Plague, larger market towns like Florence were able to economically dominant smaller towns in their production, highlighting Florence’s production of high quality textile fabrics and their dominance in the market, while smaller cities that were nearby had to resort to other methods of production, like lower quality fabrics due to their inability to compete. 

Some factors that were related to this phenomenon included trade restrictions set by larger market governments, political and social dominance that larger towns had over smaller ones, along with no common bylaws and or standards for all of Italy, as government at this time was more relative to certain areas, and dominated by the larger ones.

While today’s world works a little different than it did back in these times, there are still situations relating to natural events like the Black Death, as well as market dominance of certain areas and restrictions set by them that have a big influence on today’s economy. One example we thought of while visiting Florence is how populated and developed areas in Italy like this are still dominating higher quality production of accessory and clothing items, while a lot of lower quality items are produced for cheap in smaller and less developed villages of not just Italy but around the world.

Overall, our travels throughout Italy along with the places we’ve been able to go and people we’ve met has really opened up my eyes to see how an economy must function to survive. Natural, social, and political events seem to really shape the environment around them as it has throughout history, and continues to do so in today’s world.