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10 stories from this place.

The Cabinet June 27, 2026 · Piazza della Signoria, Florence

The Dominican Friar Who Ruled Florence for Four Years, Burned the City's Artwork and Books, and Was Then Burned Himself in the Same Piazza

Girolamo Savonarola dominated the Florentine Republic from the 1494 expulsion of the Medici until his own execution in May 1498. His February 1497 Bonfire of the Vanities consumed thousands of paintings, books, mirrors, musical instruments, and cosmetics in the Piazza della Signoria. The same piazza was the site of his hanging and burning fifteen months later, on 23 May 1498.

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The Cabinet June 26, 2026 · Fiesole, near Florence

The Hundred Tales Ten Florentines Told Each Other in a Country Villa to Wait Out the Black Death

Giovanni Boccaccio's *Decameron* (composed 1348–1353) frames its hundred tales as the entertainment of ten young Florentines — seven women, three men — who flee plague-stricken Florence for a country villa and tell each other ten stories a day for ten days. The frame story is the most substantial direct literary witness to the 1348 Florentine plague.

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The Cabinet June 26, 2026 · Convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome

The Roman Inquisition Trial That Forced an Aged Galileo to Recant His Telescopic Astronomy

Galileo Galilei was tried by the Roman Inquisition between February and June 1633 on the charge of vehement suspicion of heresy. He was 68, ill, and threatened with formal torture. He recanted publicly on 22 June 1633 and was sentenced to indefinite house arrest. The Catholic Church formally rehabilitated him in 1992.

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The Footnote June 24, 2026 · Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany

The Florentine Anatomist Who Found the Cholera Bacterium Thirty Years Before Anyone Listened

Filippo Pacini examined the intestinal tissue of cholera victims in Florence in 1854 — the same year [John Snow](/articles/john-snow-broad-street-pump) was mapping the Broad Street pump — and identified a comma-shaped bacterium he called *Vibrio cholerae*. The discovery was published in Italian, in an Italian journal, and was almost entirely ignored. [Robert Koch](/articles/robert-koch-cholera-1883) rediscovered the same organism in Egypt in 1883 and got the credit.

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The Cabinet June 24, 2026 · Syon House, Middlesex

The English Mathematician Who Made Galileo's Telescopic Discoveries Months Earlier and Published None of Them

Thomas Harriot observed the Moon through a telescope in July 1609, sunspots in late 1610, and the moons of Jupiter probably in early 1610. Each of these observations was made independently of Galileo, in some cases earlier. Harriot published nothing. He died in 1621 with about 5,000 pages of unpublished astronomical manuscripts.

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The Cabinet June 18, 2026 · Port of Messina, Sicily (point of European arrival)

The Great Mortality

Between 1347 and 1351 a pandemic killed somewhere between a third and half of everyone in Europe. Contemporaries called it the Great Mortality. It was the largest single demographic event in recorded human history.

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