Modern Italian was born in Tuscany, from the great literature of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. Can there be a deeper bond, a greater and more noble debt owed by a nation to one of its regions, than that of the common language? But the whole of Europe is in debt to Tuscany for its extraordinary contribution to European culture. It was in Tuscany between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries that the great era of humanism and the Renaissance was born and developed, movements which radically renewed the culture and art of the time, leaving a profound and indelible mark on the common civilisation of Europe. Of that extraordinary period of history, Tuscany, starting from the regional capital Florence, bears the greatest witness. Great works of civic and religious architecture, sculpture and paintings of extraordinary artistic value, testify to the creative genius of great artists: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Filippo Brunelleschi.