If you lived in florence in the 1500's the majority of the population spoke french/italian.

And people off the mainland spoke Sicilian.


This was about the time of the Italian Renaissance and france was branching back out tword western Europe .
Source(s):
Source: National Geographic magazine Volume XXXIV

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It's likely that the common parlance would be Italian, but there still may have been quite a large population of Latin speakers during that time. Italian was 'formalized' as a language in the 1300s, but modern Italian language has been found in texts as far back as the 10th century.
Source(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_language#History

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Neither, it looks like it would be Tuscan!

"With the formal unification of Italy in 1861, the Tuscan dialect of the Italian tongue became the official language of the Italian nation. The appearance of a collective Italian dialect signified the unification that took place among Italians at this time, which was also evident in Italy's political scene, educational system, and economy. " (3)
Source(s):
(1) http://www.aboutflorence.com/history-of-Florence.html
(2) http://www.alsintl.com/languages/Italian.shtml
(3) http://www.lifeinitaly.com/italian/language-history.asp

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You're writing a novel, aren't you?

You'd definitely be speaking some form of Italian over Latin.

As far as I can tell, Latin pretty quickly became a "dead" language, and wasn't really spoken as the lingua-franca much past the Roman Empire.

1. "Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration. " (Wikipedia)

2. This was smack dab in the middle of Machiavelli's time too. 3.Getting a book of his, which provides the original latin as well as translation, would give you a decent starting point to what they were really speaking in Florence at that time.
Source(s):
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Latin
2. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/354571/Niccolo-Machiavelli
3. http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Political-Writings-Niccolo-Machiavelli/dp/08...

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Immediately after the collapse of the Roman Empire, the language in its former provinces evolved separately. Some provinces never adopted Latin in the first place, like in most of the provinces in the east where the helenisitc influence was stronger. In some of provinces the Latin speakers were later outnumbered by the barbarians. In the rest of the provinces, the languages evolved separately and the fragmentation was at a smaller scale than the present day division in 5 main romance languages. For example, in Spain every province had its own dialect, quite different from each other and only later the Castillian imposed as the main language. In France, there was a similar situation and only later the northern dialect became dominant. In Italy, for example, even now if you go to Sardinia you will find people speaking a hard to understand dialect even if you know Italian. In the east, only later the southern Transylvania speach became the official Romanian language, with isolated groups still speaking other Romanian dialects in the Balkans from nothern Greece to Istria.
The bottom line is, even if the lingua franca in the cancellaries was still latin, we know that the masses were speaking very different dialects in different geographical areas. Due to the lack of written documents, it is hard to find exactly what it was, but most likely it was very differnt from both what we know as Latin and what we know as Italian.
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"The 1400s slowed the rising of the Tuscan vernacular, however, as Europe experienced a great humanistic influence. This social current lead men to admire and imitate the writers of the Antiquities, which meant a resurgence of Latin. The question was still on the minds of the people and scholars, as there was a lack of linguistic uniformity.

The 1500s and 1600s saw a renewal of the Italian language. While Latin survived in the Universities and in medicine, the smaller, more specialized academies, (which taught things such as poetry and mathematics), used the vernacular. Great works began to be formally translated and published in Italian. It was a time of relative political stability, although trade, travel, and migration were rampant, obviously taking their toll on the 'purity' of a single dialect. It was also a period of widespread bilingualism. Many knew Spanish, as it was a superpower of the time. New products from the New World called for new words. People began to write dictionaries of the 'new' language. "
Source(s):
http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/ling450ch/reports/Italian2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florentine_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florentine#Language

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Florence was a crossroads in Europe for several centuries, and I would not be surprised if Latin, French and and Italian were common in the city, along with other languages.

I think the best answer would be, what was the "Official language" of the upper classes in 16th Century Florence, like the Medici Family, the answer is "Florantine" which basically became Italian.
Source(s):
http://linguistics.byu.edu/classes/ling450ch/reports/Italian2.html
http://books.google.ca/books?id=69ey6Z-05fMC&pg=PA840&lpg=PA840&...
http://galileo.rice.edu/gal/florence.html

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Around 1300 Marco Polo dictated his famous memoirs, and the first mss was in French, we are certain of that (the rest has been obviously translated) One of the 1st copies is at the Louvre in Paris. By 1500 it had been translated in many languages, including Latin and Italian. Medieval French and Italian had a different dialect (or at least pronunciation) every 10 miles (still had when I was young, way before Europeans had TVs).
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ITALIAN ACCORDING TO THIS WEBSITE


http://www.the-chimaera.com/January2008/Trans/Evans.html
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Interestingly enough, what you'd speak would be very close to modern Italian, at least if you were living in or near Florence. This is partly because the Medici were so influential in all areas of culture and the economy, and partly because of the widespread popularity of Dante's Divine Comedy, which was written in the Tuscan dialect about 200 years before the period about which you're asking. The dialect became the standard for written Italian, and influenced spoken Italian as well.

So unless your parents were from elsewhere, you'd be speaking Toscano Dialetto. And if you were lucky enough to have been educated, you could probably read Latin and could probably even make some sense of Mass, but you wouldn't be using it every day unless you were a lawyer or a priest.
Source(s):
My degree in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

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