Communal Spaces and Buildings in the Making: Pistoia’s Piazza del Duomo (14th-18th Centuries)

This paper deals with the relationship between continuity and change in architectural history, or, to be more precise, with the relationship between the continuity of built structures and the changes in their uses and meanings, using as a case study the Piazza del Duomo in Pistoia. The piazza is a kind of fossil of the communal age, surrounded as it is by the main public buildings of the late medieval city whose physical appearance has not been radically altered over time and whose functions have even remained largely stable. And yet the buildings are at the same time characterized by a history of continuous change, as a result of the Florentine conquest and the loss of political autonomy, as well as the internal evolution of the local ruling class. The paper focuses on these transformations, which adapted the public buildings to functions quite different from those for which they were originally built, all while preserving their external appearance, in order to ideologically exalt the ancient roots of civic identity as the main cornerstone — fictitious but credible — of Pistoia’s urban image.