One Piece - Opening 2: “Believe” by Folder 5, but the visuals have been edited to accomodate the extended version of the song.
My extended version of “We Are!” got some positive feedback so I figured I’d keep going. The added scenes are from “One Piece: Grand Battle 2″ as well as some episode clips.
Honestly, this song was a lot harder. The song is so homogonous, that no clip ever really felt like it “belonged” at a certain part in the song. Regardless, I am happy with the results, I got some parts to sync up pretty well.
This is one of the few visual edits to the manga, changing Loguetown to Roguetown. It makes sense that a town known for producing a great rogue to be named this, but it has been confirmed that the logue bit is from the words prologue and epilogue. Thus I’m using Loguetown in tags.
Florence as the inspiration for Loguetown: an analysis
Oda has never been to Italy, but it’s one of the countries from which he has frequently drawn inspiration for One Piece. Examples confirmed by the author include the Dressrosa Colosseum (based on the one in Rome), Water 7 and the Aqua Laguna (based on Venice and the acqua alta phenomenon). People have also pointed out the similarities between Impel Down and Dante Alighieri’s Inferno.
But not many people know that there’s another city in the One Piece world that looks exactly like a real world one, even more than Water7/Venice. As far as I know, this resemblance was hardly ever pointed out outside the Italian One Piece community and never explored in depth.
I’m talking about Florence and Loguetown.
1: Architecture
When I watched the Loguetown arc for the first time years ago, I didn’t realize the connection. I hadn’t read the manga yet, I was too busy following the story and the anime didn’t exactly do justice to the manga with the background art. It was only when I looked at this bird’s eye view of the town in Treasure Cruise that it struck me: Loguetown is Florence!
Two of Florence’s most famous landmarks, Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral with its iconic octagonal dome and Palazzo Vecchio with its bell tower can be spotted in panels throughout the arc.
It’s also worth noting that the architectural style of the buildings in Loguetown is very similar to what can be seen in the historic center of Florence. The only exception is the big building right behind the execution stand, that doesn’t really fit in with the style of the rest of the city and has no real-world reference. That’s because Oda first drew it in chapter 1, when he hadn’t planned Loguetown yet and decided it should be based on Florence.
Here’s the building in chapter 1:
And here’s it in chapter 97:
Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral:
Palazzo Vecchio:
Typical Florentine streets and buildings:
And here they are in the manga:
In chapter 99, the background architecture in this panel reminded me a lot of the Florentine Gothic style such as the one of Giotto’s bell tower:
The place where Dragon appears to help Luffy escape (chapter 100) may have been inspired by the Loggia dei Lanzi, located right next to Palazzo Vecchio:
2: Shop Signs
Throughout the Loguetown Arc many shop signs in Italian can be seen. I’ve tried to decipher them.
In chapter 96, when Tashigi first appears, there’s a shop sign with the word “scelti”. It means “select, high quality”, as in “a select choice of products” and it may refer to food or artisanal goods.
In chapter 97, when Nami is shopping, next to “glove factory” (Florence is also famous for leather goods), we can read “Robecca …ng(?)”. “Robecca” doesn’t really mean anything in Italian and nothing shows up in Google. At first I thought it may be a misspelling of “Rebecca”, a jewelry brand from Florence, but then I found out that this brand was created after Loguetown Arc was published. It may be a shop that no longer exists.
In chapter 99, we can read “Premi… …dam(?)”. The first word may be “Premiata”, an Italian shoe brand. But “premiata” is also a recurring word in shop names that means “prized”. There are also many other Italian words that start with “premi-”.
And finally, the best ones. Oda took these directly from the real world and put them in One Piece. In chapter 97, Zoro is walking in front of three shops. The first one on the left is Madova, a leather goods shop still active in Florence:
The second one is called “Villa Medici”, which sounded like the name of a hotel so I looked it up and yes, it does exist and it’s right there in Florence. It’s called Grand Hotel Villa Medici:
The third one is Ottino, which as I discovered is a very old leather accessories shop. Now the exterior has been renovated, but in this picture from a few years ago you can see the same arches and the same street lamp as the ones drawn by Oda in the late 90s:
3: History
Loguetown is famous for being the city where Gol D. Roger was born and executed, and because of this is called “the town of the beginning and the end”.
The Piazza della Signoria in Florence, in front of Palazzo Vecchio, was the place where public executions were held, the most famous of them being Girolamo Savonarola’s execution in 1498. Unlike Roger (or Luffy’s execution attempt by Buggy), he was first hanged and then burned, but the setting was not too different from the one in One Piece:
Conclusion: even though the historical parallel is just speculation, the architecture and the shop signs are indisputable evidence that Oda had Florence in mind when he devised Loguetown. It’s the only instance I can remember in One Piece where he took real world details such as shop names and put them into the story.
The next time I go to Florence I won’t look at it the same way knowing that One Piece characters have also walked those streets :)
