Florence, 1216: the city
Florence on Easter morning 1216, to walk through on foot. It is the explorable part of Cosa fatta capo ha, a
serious game for schools in development: the game tells the story of the murder of Buondelmonte de' Buondelmonti,
the event the chronicles take as the start of Guelphs and Ghibellines; the city shows the places. The class writes
the chronicle as a young notary, then compares it with the chronicles that survive.
It needs a computer or tablet with a good graphics card: the model is built for high-end hardware, and the first
opening takes a few tens of seconds.
Prototype (October 2026): the whole city inside the 1172–75 walls, house by house, with walls, gates and the
suburbs outside them; photographic textures and animated people. Two days: 10 February, the broken promise, and
Easter morning, the murder. On 10 February the city is at work: food stalls in the Old Market, money
changers at their tables, cloth merchants in via Calimala, a smithy near the Santa Maria gate, notaries at their
desks, each with its own sound; on Easter morning the market is empty. The story mode leads from scene to scene of the game, each in its place. The
January 1216 banquet is a separate place, the Mazzinghi castle at Campi. The full plan, with phases, sources, calendar
and risks, is in PIANO.md.
Made for anyone
It is designed to be used without a keyboard and on an iPad. At the start you choose between a guided visit (ten
stops, from the Buondelmonte house to the walls) and exploring alone.
| |
|---|
| Tap or click the street | walk there, turning corners on your own |
| Drag | look around |
| From above (F) | a view over the roofs; tap a point to fly there |
| What is certain (C) | colours everything by how much we know about it |
| Story (R) | the game's scenes, in their places |
| Go to… | the list of places, each with its card and sources |
| Settings | the day (10 February or Easter), lighter or richer images, larger text, reduced motion |
Every scene of the game has a link (?scena=IV3 opens the voices on the bridge), and npm run verifica checks, on
every change, that each place can be reached on foot and each scene has a walkable point of view.
A small map in the corner shows where you are; tap it to open the full plan and tap a place to go there. The stops of the visit and the place cards can be read aloud with the device's voice, and the visit ends with four questions for the class. The city is in Italian and English (Settings, or ?lang=en): buttons, visit, questions and cards; the game's story mode is Italian only for now.
What it is not
- Not validated yet. No medievalist has seen it.
- The houses are generated by the program. Only the churches and the named towers have the plan of a real
building.
- The murder is not shown. The model shows the place, not the killing.
- The story comes from a draft script, not yet reviewed by a medievalist.
- The walls are rebuilt on today's streets, which keep their line; heights, battlements and gate towers are
hypotheses. On the south side, towards the Arno, we do not know where they ran: turn on "What is certain" to see both
possibilities.
Run it
npm install
npm run dev # then open http://localhost:5216
npm run verifica # every place reachable, every scene walkable
Licences and credits
Code under MIT (LICENSE); texts, cards and script texts under CC BY 4.0
(LICENSE-CONTENUTI.md); map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL 1.0); photographic
textures from Poly Haven (CC0); figures from MakeHuman (CC0) with motion from the CMU Graphics Lab Motion Capture
Database; horses, mules and donkeys from Lyndon Daniels' "Rigged Horse" (CC0). Every source and level of certainty is
listed in README.it.md and in the FONTI.md files under strumenti/. To cite:
CITATION.cff.
About
Built by Domenico Perroni: HR advisory and people analytics, with a master's in media education, based in Kraków.
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