The textile trade was a major player in the early modern Florentine economy, with both wool and silk being used for everyday and luxury clothing and decoration. This map shows the residences of sarti (tailors), tessitori (weavers), rigattieri (cloth retailers) and stracciaiuoli (cloth scrap merchants).

As you can see, textile weaving was an extremely common profession in Renaissance Florence; the majority of workers in this map are weavers. The second map below shows the gendered division of this labour, with female weavers (blue) distinctly relegated to the working-class areas of the city and better-paid, male silk weavers (red) located in the city’s downtown core.