Florentine America from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (1800–2026)

What if modern America had grown not from Spanish conquest and Anglo-American expansion, but from the legacy of Florence? In this episode, we follow the long evolution of an alternative world in which Columbus’s voyage was financed by Florentine bankers and Renaissance elites. By 1800, Florentine America is no longer a distant colonial project, but a complex Atlantic civilization of port cities, commercial republics, urban elites, and Italophone culture. From there, the story moves into the modern age: independence movements, new states, industrialization, world wars, globalization, and the shape of the world in 2026. How would an America shaped by Tuscan language, banking traditions, republican city culture, and Renaissance prestige have changed modernity itself? Would a true equivalent of the United States have emerged? Would the twentieth century still have belonged to an Anglo-American world? Or would a powerful Italophone America have stood at the center of global politics, trade, and culture instead? This episode explores a different path into the modern age—one in which the New World carries the imprint not of Castile, but of Florence.