† Caesar and Cola di Rienzo remained sources of inspiration for many years. Rienzo inspired a novel by Bulwer-Lytton and an opera by Wagner, the latter much admired in Stalin’s Russia and in Hitler’s Germany. The title Caesar mutated to Tsar in 1547, when Ivan the Terrible assumed the role in Russia. In the German-speaking territories the emperor of Austria was a Kaiser (a Caesar), but to the rest of the world that title has referred to the Prussian Hohenzollerns who became emperors of Germany in 1871.
‡ While Santa Croce was given a neo-Gothic west front in the nineteenth century, San Lorenzo, Santo Spirito and Santa Maria del Carmine remain without façades to this day.
** In the seventy years after 1455 the Borgia, Piccolomini, della Rovere and Medici each provided two popes.
†† The Renaissance arrived very late in Spain. A century after Brunelleschi had built his dome in Florence, the Spanish were still building Gothic cathedrals.
‡‡ It also became the second largest in Europe after Paris. At the end of the sixteenth century it had a population of 280,000, twice the size of Venice and more than three times the size of Florence.
§§ By the end of the following century this figure had increased to 148. The island also contained 788 marquesses and about 1,500 dukes and other barons.18