Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2019
The famous Florentine tax census, the Catasto, contains an element that has escaped organized scholarly attention. This is the confini: bare-bones lists of neighbors by which householders identified the location of private property to government officials. This article exploits the confini to expose the microscopic connective fibers of spatial relationships that citizens reproduced every day at the level of individual streets, piazze, and buildings. Laying bare these elusive, ephemeral processes reveals how Florentines, like the inhabitants of other premodern European centers, conceived, articulated, and produced notions of urban space amid the structures and mundane rhythms of everyday life.