The jewel of Tuscan region, Florence is a city of central Italy on the Arno River, at the foot of the Apennines, east of Pisa. It is the capital city of Tuscany, the region in the northwest Italy surrounded by Apennines, the Ligurian Sea, and Tyrrhenian Sea. Florence is also known as Firenze.
Florence was a powerful city-state under the Medici family. The city was the center of the Italian Renaissance from the 14th century to the 16th century, and during that time artists and intellectuals like Boccaccio, Botticelli, Dante, Donatello, Filippo Brunelleschi, Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Niccol:%$ograve; Machiavelli etc. flourished in the city. It is said that of the 1,000 most important European artists of the second millennium, 350 lived or worked in Florence.