Piazza della Repubblica

This guide to Piazza della Repubblica in Florence starts with the triumphant Latin inscription on its arch, celebrating a nineteenth-century renewal of the city center, and what that inscription leaves out. It traces the three centuries this ground spent as Florence's sealed Jewish ghetto, established in 1571 under Cosimo the First de Medici and locked behind gates each night, through emancipation in 1861 and the wrecking crews sent through the old quarter afterward. Look up at the arch overhead and weigh its claim of renewal against the walls it once stood behind.