The City and the Sacred From Roman times to Christianity, a sacred place that became one of the most important spaces in the city.
When the Romans conquered the land of the Etruscans, they founded a military township in a place where Italic peoples from the Appenines between Tuscany and Emilia had settled centuries earlier. That township gradually grew into a city. Its favourable geographical location turned ancient Florentia, founded in 59 BC, into a economic power of some consequence by the 2nd century AD. The Florence cathedral area, in the sense of a sacred space rather than a square, was first instituted in the northeast corner of Roman Florentia's ancient castrum.
When a Christian community settled in this Roman outpost, the event marked the start of a process which was to lead over the centuries to the formation of this place of worship within the square of Florence's very first city walls.
But by the time that occurred, the city's conversion to Christianity must already have been far advanced because the first Christian churches were normally built on the outskirts of urban areas. The first Christians to live on the banks of the Arno came from the east, as indeed did the two leading figures in the early history of the Church in Florence: Minas, "King of the Armenians", who was martyred in Florence during the persecutions of the Emperor Decius in AD, and Zenobius, the great 5th century Bishop born to a Greek-Syriac family.
At this time, Roman Florentia's sacred space had not yet been properly defined; in fact the first Florentine church for which we have archaeological and epigraphic evidence is Santa Felicita, which is located outside the walls to the south of the city. The earliest concrete reference to a stable Christian community in the city, in the 4 th century, tells us of the presence of Bishop Felix in "Florentia Tuscorum" in for the Roman synod, although there must have been Christians in Florence before then if Minas was buried in AD on the hill later named after him to the southeast of the Roman city.
