The city of Florence may be famous for its role in the Italian renaissance but on Monday it was celebrating a different kind of resurrection.

Florentia Viola - the phoenix club which arose from the ashes of the now defunct Fiorentina - won promotion from Serie C2 to Serie C1 by beating Savona 3-0 on Sunday to ensure they would win one of three Serie C2 tiers.

Some 35,000 fans - many who see the new club as the living incarnation of their former favourites - witnessed the victory at the Stadio Artemio Franchi, the former home ground of the 'Viola' (violets) as Fiorentina were known.

Nearly 17,000 had taken up season tickets last summer when the fledgling outfit was launched after Fiorentina had folded.

Next year they will play in Serie C1 - the top level of the amateur game - with promotion to the professional Serie B beckoning in 12 months' time.

No-one epitomised the success more than the 36-year-old Angelo Di Livio who was playing World Cup football for Italy in Japan last summer but agreed to a massive pay cut and to drop three divisions with the new club, despite other more lucrative offers.

Di Livio, a member of Marcello Lippi's all-conquering Juventus team in the mid-1990s, missed the clincher with a knee injury but was still mobbed by supporters.

During Fiorentina's miserable relegation campaign in Serie A last season, Di Livio acted as players' spokesman and won widespread admiration for his attitude, bursting into tears on the day the club went down.

Three years ago Fiorentina were playing Champions League football and as recently as 1999 the club then coached by Giovanni Trapattoni looked set to win the Scudetto.

They led at Easter but then talismanic forward Gabriel Batistuta was injured and Brazilian Edmundo went AWOL to play drums in a samba band at the Rio de Janeiro carnival. AC Milan won the title after Fiorentina and then Lazio choked.

However, last summer - after relegation to Serie B - the club was declared bankrupt because of the huge financial debts accumulated under president Vittorio Cecchi Gori, Italy's leading film mogul.

Cecchi Gori was the son of the late Mario Cecchi Gori who was at the helm when Fiorentina won the 1969 Scudetto and, although the son is now a pariah in Florence, his mother and Mario's widow Valeria remained a popular figure until her death last year.

During the relegation campaign the players went unpaid for long periods while the likes of Francesco Toldo and Manuel Rui Costa had been sold the previous summer to Inter Milan and AC Milan to raise revenue - in vain as it turned out.

Florentia Viola emerged following their extinction and took up a place in the central Italy tier of the three-tier Serie C2.

With promotion secure, the club could now even buy the name Fiorentina at an auction of the liquidated club's assets which is planned for May.

It is not Leonardo Da Vinci but Alberto Cavasin who has been at the heart of this Florentine renaissance.

Cavasin, voted Serie A's top coach when he was in charge of Lecce, refused many higher offers to accept the task of reviving football in the heart of Tuscany and insisted after beating Savona that his decision was justified.

"The glory should go to all our fans who are like a Champions League fan base," said Cavasin on the www.soccerage.com/it website.

"I am happy at taking on this task even if I had to drop in status."

Florence's mayor Leonardo Domenici said: "It's a victory for Florence and all its people who have behaved superbly.

"Soon we will return to where we belong. I am convinced our club will produce innovations in (Italian) football which needs to be reformed."

Florentia Viola president Gino Salica said: "People are talking about Serie B but we are already planning to return to Serie A."

Batistuta, Trapattoni, Cecchi Gori and the others may have departed the scene but Sunday's success could herald a new footballing dawn for a club which may be re-named Fiorentina in time for the next campaign.