Oltrarno

This guide to Florence's Oltrarno quarter turns on a summer night in 1378, when the ciompi, the city's lowest-paid wool workers, set their own neighborhood ablaze rather than keep suffering in silence. It follows Michele di Lando, a woolcomber whose mother took in washing and whose wife ran a butcher's stall, as the crowd lifts him into the city's highest office. The bookbinders, goldsmiths and leather workers still at their benches here today work the same trades as those wool combers once did.