Guilds not only participated in the running of the city; they and other corporate bodies developed and maintained charitable institutions of various kinds. Feeding the poor and indigent, housing foundlings and orphans, and caring for the sick were among the tasks supported by groups of Florentines. The groups and their charitable projects were often housed in buildings of some significance, as Philip Gavitt recounts. The urban poor themselves had fewer resources to leave architectural marks upon the urban fabric; many of their divisions of space left traces that are harder now to discern. By the late fifteenth century, the city was mapped not only into the parishes and militia districts known by their banners, but also festival brigades known as "potenze" that left marks of their boundaries still identifiable on the walls of city buildings. These groups, which drew their membership mainly from lower social and income levels, celebrated May Day and other holidays, including Carnival, and also made pilgrimages to local shrines. They went into decline in the early seventeenth century; David Rosenthal attributes the cause primarily to the era's religious reform impulses. They were able to develop their alternate mapping of the city, divided among these various festival "kingdoms," especially because each of the city's individual neighborhoods and official gonfaloni included residents at all social levels, rather than clustering them into solidly wealthy or poor sections. Neighborhood identities remained strong throughout the era, though Nicholas Eckstein notes that by the sixteenth century they competed with other, more city-wide types of community identity that arose especially with that era's increasing degree of social stratification. Other uses of space have also left only the faintest of traces. The Wool Guild organized the itineraries or visiting wool merchants during the fourteenth century by channeling them into specific routes and itineraries with visits to the guild hall and relevant clusters of shops. Thus they orchestrated to a significant degree the Florentine experience of these visitors to the city. The aim, according to Adrienne Atwell, was to promote foreign trade by presenting a uniform, impressive, and organized experience to foreign traders.
House towers may have ceased to define the environs of Florence's big families by the fourteenth century, but real estate remained a way to express identity, as seen in the term "house" (casa) to refer both to family and to dwelling. Florentines developed a variety of legal incentives that encouraged ownership and investment in private residences. Palazzo-building accelerated already in the fourteenth century and really hit its stride in the fifteenth and finally stabilized as a style that persisted long afterwards. Their owners filled these very substantial residences with items not only for personal comfort but also for display, contributing to the development of both artistic and artisanal production in the city. Michael Lingohr, Roger Crum, and John Paoletti discuss the development of these spaces and the issues attached to those who were permitted, or invited, to see and to visit them. Domestic spaces were of course a particularly female realm. The growing use of this space by visitors in search of favor for positions and other preferments from powerful families provided an arena in which the women of these powerful families, above all the Medici, could exercise political and social patronage. Street life was more clearly dominated by men, though women of lower classes faced fewer restrictions on their movement, and those of the major houses certainly managed to circulate through the city. Natalie Tomas and Guido Ruggiero discuss these issues of gendered space, the latter reminding us of the powers of jest and ridicule in displays of dominance among Florentine men.
