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education and literacy reached levels that were not to be matched until well into the twentieth century and that would still be regarded as exceptional in many parts of the world today. In the mid-1330s, Villani recorded that eight to ten thousand boys and girls werelearning to read in the city at that time, a figure which would suggest that 67–83 percent of the population had some basic schooling. While we could be forgiven for treating Villani’s estimate with some skepticism, his testimony is borne out by the evidence of the catasto (tax records).In the catasto of 1427, for example, around 80 percent of the men in the city were literate enough to complete their own returns. By the same token, serious attempts were made to provide for the poor, the sick, and the needy. Designed by Brunelleschi, the Ospedale degli Innocenti was established as a tax-exempt institution in 1495 to care for orphans and to provide facilities for needy women entering childbirth. In 1494, the city opened a hospital for victims of the plague that ensured the city would be insulated against epidemic and that provided medical care for the sick.
    Money and civic confidence had also transformed Florence’s urban landscape. At the same time as private wealth was being poured into the construction of buildings such as the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, a deliberate effort had been made to imitate the architecture of antiquity and to create perfect cities.Vitruvius’s De architectura —the most complete classical treatise on building methods and design—had been rediscovered in its entirety by the Florentine Poggio Bracciolini in 1415,prompting a flurry of architects to put the ancient writer’s ideas into practice and to experiment with new approaches to the design and management of urban spaces. There was a veritable fetish for the ideal. Architects, artists, and thinkers vied with one another in producing the most utopian vision of city life, a tendency that is more than evident in The Ideal City ( Fig. 2 ), painted by an anonymous artist toward the end of the fifteenth century.
    This fetish for the ideal was mirrored by concerted efforts to put ancient architectural theory into practice, and as the confidence of city-states like Florence grew, the revival of the classical style became a powerful expression of civic identity and pride. There was a sense among Renaissance Florentines in particular that the utopianism of The Ideal City had been real in many ways and that their city was truly perfect. In his Invective Against Antonio Loschi (1403), the Florentine chancellorColuccio Salutati described Florence with characteristically gushing enthusiasm. “What city,” he asked,
not merely in Italy, but in all the world, is more securely placed within its walls, more proud in its palazzi, more bedecked with churches, more beautiful in its architecture, more imposing in its gates, richer in piazzas, happier in its wide streets, greater in its people, more glorious in its citizenry, more inexhaustible in wealth, more fertile in its fields?
    Indeed, so pronounced was this sense of pride and excitement among Florentine intellectuals that an entire genre of literature devoted to the praise of the city was quickly developed. Written at approximately the same time as Salutati’s Invective ,Leonardo Bruni’s Panegyric to the City of Florence (1403–4) was designed to provide its citizens with an image of their city capable of filling them with republican pride and confidence and was hence even more packed with praise.
    Despite having some doubts as to whether his eloquence was sufficient to describe the majesty of Florence, Bruni described the city’s many merits in exhaustive detail, beginning with an ostentatiously over-the-top celebration of the city’s inhabitants. But what he wished to stress above all else was the urban environment and, in doing so, he provided a wonderfully lyrical expression of the loom on which thefabric of the Renaissance was