Nuova Cronica

The Nuova Cronica or New Chronicles is a 14th-century history of Florence created in a year-by-year linear format and written by the Florentine banker and official Giovanni Villani (c. 1276 or 1280–1348). The idea came to him after attending the first Jubilee in the city of Rome, in 1300, where he realized that Rome's many historical achievements were well-known, and he desired to lay out a history of the origins of his own city of Florence. In his Cronica, Villani described in detail the many building projects of the city, statistical information on population, ordinances, commerce and trade, education, and religious facilities. He also described several disasters such as famines, floods, fires, and the pandemic of the Black Death in 1348, which would take his own life. Villani's work on the Cronica was continued by his brother and nephew after his death. It has been described as the first introduction of statistics as a positive element in history.

The oldest manuscript is Vatican Library BAV Chigiano L VIII 296, dating to the time of composition.

Giovanni Villani's Cronica is divided into twelve books; the first six deal with the largely legendary history of Florence, starting at conventionally Biblical times to 1264. The second phase, in six books, covers the history from 1264 until his own time, all the way up to 1346. Villani outlines the events in his Cronica, not by theme, but through year-to-year accounts; for this, he has gained criticism over the years for writing in an episodic manner lacking a unifying theme or point of view. Villani's chronicles are intercut with historical episodes reported just as he heard them, with little interpretation; this often led to historical inaccuracies in his work, making most of his mistakes in the biographies of historical or contemporary people living outside of Florence (even with well-known monarchs). However, his description of such events as the Battle of Crécy in 1346 was fairly accurate according to historian Kelly De Vries. Both Bartlett and Green state that Villani's Cronica represented a departure from medieval chronicles in that a more modernistic approach was taken in describing events and statistics, yet still medieval in that Villani relied on divine providence to explain the outcome of events.

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