“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. They produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
Orson Welles
Italy also had the Medici's at that time, Lorenzo and Pietro. Polar opposite of the Borgias.
I think sometimes turmoil produces ideas and developments that might not come up otherwise. But living through that is something else.