From late antiquity until the nineteenth century the Italian peninsula was made up of numerous states and city-states, governed as republics, or ruled by kings, dukes or popes. While diverse attempts were made to unify these disparate political entities through language and culture, or warfare and realpolitik, the dominant situation was one of intense rivalry and intermittent conflict. That uniquely Italian idea of campanilismo, or pride in one's own bell-tower, was borne of this continuous rivalry. It encapsulates an important concept, that local pride was inscribed in the physical fabric of the city, that a bell-tower could stand for a collective sense of one city's self-image and that this was expressed and calibrated in relation to neighbours, who were usually rivals. It is within this frame of references that much recent scholarship on urban image and identity has focused, teasing out the intentional distinctions that were drawn socio-politically and culturally, between the major centres of the peninsula. Such a process has significantly altered the view, dominant until quite recently, that style in art and architecture followed a single evolutionary route that passed from one place to another, as each lived a ‘golden age’ that defined a single ‘urban’ school – Siena, Venice, Florence, Rome, Bologna. In its place, a more nuanced view of how each centre fostered, reacted, responded and adopted innovation and change has come to the fore. In a generation of scholarship that followed Michael Baxandall's ground-breaking Painting and Experience, the idea that Renaissance Italians consciously fashioned urban images and identities has entered the mainstream. Scholars have put artworks and buildings back into close relation with the social contexts of their production and have asked how they worked in relation to their users and viewers.

In 1522, the artisan festive ‘kingdom’ of the Biliemme put up the biggest street tabernacle in Florence. German textile workers were behind the tabernacle and this article argues that, at a time of crisis for German workers, these men looked to reassert their place in Florence through their participation in a citywide artisan festive subculture. Forty years later, Germans in the Biliemme district had largely been replaced by textile migrants from other parts of Italy. Nonetheless the kingdom remained a important vehicle for creating neighbourhood solidarities and for incorporating these new migrants into the artisan and civic world.

Historians of early modern Italy have traditionally viewed the city's public spaces, such as streets, quarters, taverns and marketplaces, as the chief locations in which claims to identity were launched into the broader urban community. Recent studies on the domestic interior, however, have shown that the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century urban space was much more complex. In this period, private urban houses became sites for an increasing range of social acitvities that varied from informal evening gatherings to large wedding banquets. Focusing on this ‘public’ dimension of the private urban house, this article explores how the middling classes of artisans and shopkeepers used the domestic space to construct identities and to facilitate social relations in sixteenth-century Siena. The aim is to show that in providing a setting for differing forms of economic and social activity, the urban home together with its objects and furnishings may have provided an increasingly important physical location for craftsmen, shop-owners and traders to negotaite individual and collective identities within the broader communities of the city.

During the sixteenth century, antiquarians increasingly developed a self-conscious identity as a professional group with specific social, intellectual and artisan skills. Their activity was not linked to a particular place though: antiquities surfaced from the earth both inside and outside the city walls and were traded in streets, squares, private houses and gardens. Using the Stampa brothers as a case-study, this article investigates the role and commercial strategies of antiquarians and their ability to cross the boundaries of social groups, since they had to deal with artisans, peasants and artists on one side, and cardinals and gentlemen on the other.

The article analyses the diffusion of artificial grottoes in Genoa during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in terms of their role in the construction of the ruling oligarchy's social identity. No other artistic genre offered a more effective means for bankers and merchants to flaunt their wealth and their network of international contacts. Grottoes comprising expensive corals and exotic shells functioned as a strategic marketing device whose cost and splendour satisfied not only the discerning humanist but also made a profound impression upon non-expert guests who were, first and foremost, potential future business clients.

On account of their dual function as princes of the church and agents for the king of France, the French cardinals in Rome constitute a well-defined and self-contained community. They were governed by complex internal dynamics as well as by the need to present a unified front to the pope, in addition to the College of Cardinals and the citizenry of Rome. French cardinals present in Rome between 1490 and 1560 were mobile, as their physical presence in the city was not continuous: a number of them were stable residents in Rome, charged with diplomatic missions, while others only attended the conclaves. A special case is that of Jean du Bellay, who became fully integrated into the life of the city, established a literary salon open to artists and poets, and was involved in the study of Antiquities and the construction of a villa-garden complex, the Horti Bellayani.

On the definitive return of the pope to Rome in 1420, following the so-called Avignonese captivity, the city underwent major modifications. The ‘romanam curiam sequentes’, the court and administration that followed the traditionally itinerant pope, settled in the city, leading to Rome's population doubling in the space of a few years. Furthermore, with the support of the pope, the members of the curia came to take possession of spaces, offices, roles and rituals that had previously been the reserve of the local Romans. This article considers the reaction of the community of the local nobility (here described summarily as Roman families) to the encroaching presence of the curia within the specific context of the development of the built form of the via Papalis. It is argued that the via Papalis, one of the most important and prestigious streets in Rome, became the theatre within which these two communities played out their conflict through the medium of built and ephemeral architecture.

In Renaissance Italy clothing, particularly of women, was strictly regulated; individuals were regularly denounced when walking through the city. Modesty was a virtue in a republican state and dress played a major part in urban identity, reflecting social values and those of the political regime. Sumptuary laws were a major mode of control, particularly of patrician women, whose dress reflected both their own and their family's wealth and status. Despite increased availability of luxurious fabrics encouraged by urban policies, legislation was used to prohibit new forms of dress and raise money for state coffers. At the end of the fifteenth century Pandolfo Petrucci (1452–1512) took control of Siena. The inner elite of his regime, particularly its female members, were given exemptions from the strict legislation and were able to flaunt their elevated status and the new social order.

It is well known that the shift from canti carnascialeschi to mascherate, which took place in Florence during the first half of the sixteenth century, corresponds to parallel political changes from republic to duchy. The role of the new Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici in the transformation of Florentine street festivals must be appraised through his aim of establishing a courtly society in which the nobility were subjected to his control. In this article, this double process of change is observed through documents which show how the courtly mascherata can be viewed as a means by which courtiers sought to be identified as a homogeneous group by all Florentine citizens, looking at and listening to them from their windows.

In 1860, Jacob Burckhardt published his view, still influential today, of an artful, urban Italian Renaissance that launched Europe on its passage to modernity. A lively revisionary scholarship has challenged Burckhardt on many points, but his famous formulae still resonate: the state as work of art; the development of the individual; the discovery of the world and of man. Although we now know that Italy did not alone invent the new age, it was for many years a trendsetter, especially in the domains of cultural production at the centre of this collection of essays. Republican and princely polities alike framed these developments, but, whoever ruled, Italy's unusually intense urbanization (paired with that in another well-spring of culture in the Low Countries) fostered innovation. In Renaissance cities, people and groups invested heavily in special actions, objects and places – charismatic cultural products empowered by holiness, beauty, fame and ingenuity – that fortified solidarity and resilience in uncertain times. This essay collection addresses a conjunction of urban culture and society distinctive to Renaissance Italy: an array of encounters of artifacts with ways of living in community.