Prato

Prato lies on the Bisenzio in the plain just north of Florence, a wool town that grew with the devotion to the Sacra Cintola, the Virgin's girdle kept in its cathedral, and surrounded itself with a second circuit of walls from 1300. Pressed by Florentine ambition and quarrels among its own wealthy families, it put itself under Robert of Anjou, King of Naples, and on 23 February 1351 Joanna sold it to Florence for 17,500 gold florins. The merchant Francesco Datini made it a great trading house, and the archive of his letters and accounts, produced between 1363 and 1410, is a unique record of late medieval trade.

Prato's artists belonged to the Florentine Renaissance: Filippo Lippi painted the cathedral's frescoes, and Donatello and Michelozzo made the outer pulpit from which the girdle is shown. On 29 August 1512, in the war of the Holy League, the Spanish army under Raimondo de Cardona stormed and sacked Prato, and the slaughter, put by chroniclers at between 2,000 and 6,000 people, led Florence's republic to surrender and the Medici to return; the town declined for two centuries. In 1653 it became a city and a diocese, and Ferdinando Tacca made the Fontana del Bacchino for the occasion. Under the Lorraine grand dukes in the eighteenth century the city was embellished and its culture grew.