Arezzo

Arezzo is an Etruscan hill city in the upper Arno valley, one of the twelve cities of the Etruscan league, where the bronze Chimera was found in 1553. The commune threw off its bishop's control in 1098 and was an independent, generally Ghibelline city-state, with a university founded in 1252, until 1384. After the defeat at Campaldino in 1289 its fortunes ebbed, apart from a brief period under the Tarlati family and Bishop Guido Tarlati, who died in 1327.

His brother Pier Saccone, pressed by internal enemies, Florentines and Perugians and by economic crisis, handed Arezzo to Florence for ten years in 1337 for money; independence came back but not prosperity. In 1384 the city was annexed by Florence, and Florentine art took over: the last local painter, Spinello Aretino, gave way to Piero della Francesca, who painted the Legend of the True Cross in the basilica of San Francesco. The city rose against Florence in the early sixteenth century, and again in 1529 after plague and famine, but the Medici army retook it after 1530.