Dwarkesh Patel

And we're going to continue to – if there was a mandatory outfit that people wore who worked in the Republic, which there was.

The garment thing over there in the corner is an underway.

This was the garment you were mandated by law to wear if you held office in the Florentine Republic.

To us, we look at it and we're like, it's a long red robe.

It looks very Renaissance.

To them, it looked like a toga because of the way it was draped.

They thought of this as a toga.

They're cosplaying the Roman Republic.

And wearing a Florentine toga while in office was something that you did to represent your fealty to Cicero and Republican values.

And the dukes made their men continue to wear these.

In fact, the first Duke, Cosimo I, would wear one to costume balls as if in his heart he longed to not dress like a duke but to dress in a toga like a Republican.

Yeah, the Roman Senate keeps meeting until 1200 AD.

And it means that more rights are granted to the people of Florence than to other cities that felt a monarchies at similar points.

Because the monarchs of Florence know they have to be careful and they have to respect rights to a certain amount and they can't run roughshod over them.

There's a really cool building that I love in Florence.

If you've been there, there's the famous bridge, the Ponte Vecchio, which has the little jeweler shops all along it.

And when you get to the end of it, there's this funny...

over the head corridor, the Vasari Corridor, as we call it, which was built by the Dukes of Florence to connect the old city palace where the Senate used to meet, where they had to have their seat of power, to their new palace across the river, which was much bigger, where they could have grand balls and things that dukes need to have.

And because they're so terrified of being assassinated by their own people, they built this overhead walkway that goes from one end of the city to the other so that they could walk in safety without being assassinated.

Right.