Transcriber’s Note

Larger versions of most illustrations may be seen by right-clicking them and selecting an option to view them separately, or by double-tapping and/or stretching them.

[Additional notes] will be found near the end of this ebook.

FLORENTINE
PALACES
AND
THEIR
STORIES

BY

JANET
ROSS

[All Rights Reserved]

PALAZZO ANTINORI. [Page 37].

FLORENTINE
PALACES
& THEIR STORIES

BY
JANET ROSS

WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
ADELAIDE MARCHI

1905
LONDON
J. M. DENT & CO.
29 & 30 BEDFORD STREET, W. C.
NEW YORK: E. P. DUTTON & CO.

Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
BREAD STREET HILL, E. C., AND
BUNGAY, SUFFOLK.

Dedication

To Cavaliere Angelo Bruschi, Librarian of the Biblioteca Marucelliana, this book of the Palaces of his native city is dedicated in memory of much kindness and ever-ready help by

Janet Ross.

LIST OF PALACES

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FLORENTINE PALACES

PALAZZO ACCIAIUOLI
Lung’Arno Acciaiuoli. No. 4.

In 1109 Guigliarello Acciaiuoli came from Brescia, where his family had made a fortune by working in steel (acciaio)—hence their name. He bought many houses in Borgo S.S. Apostoli and a domain in the Val di Pesa, where he built a tower which was still standing in 1588 when Giovambattista Ubaldini wrote the Origine della Famiglia Acciaiuoli. True to the Guelph traditions the family brought with them from Brescia, Leone Acciaiuoli was forced to fly from Florence after the Ghibelline victory at Montaperti in 1260 and his palace was destroyed. On the return to power of the White, or Guelph, party, Dardano Acciaiuoli became Gonfalonier of Justice, and was afterwards sent with full powers from the Signoria of Florence, “considering his great prudence and legal knowledge,” as Captain of the People to rule Pistoja. When in 1282 the government of Florence was changed and the Priors were instituted, Riccomanni degl’Acciaiuoli, doctor of law, was elected Prior of his Sesto of the city. He founded a great bank, or commercial company, with branches in many parts of Italy, in France, England, Greece, Africa and Asia, and sent Acciaiuolo Acciaiuoli to manage the branch at Naples. There he became the trusted friend and counsellor of King Robert, who made him a Baron, gave him great estates in Apulia and the lordship of Prato in Tuscany with the title of royal Vicario. His far more famous son Niccola, was born in 1310 at Monte Guffoni in the Val di Pesa, and married before he was eighteen. Three years later he took his father’s place at Naples, and being remarkable for personal beauty, dignified in manner and gifted with a brilliant intelligence, he soon attained such favour at court that when the Prince of Taranto died in 1332, his widow appointed him, by the advice of her brother-in-law King Robert, guardian of her three young sons and of the principality. Evil tongues whispered that his good looks had much to do with this nomination. Six years later Niccola went to Greece, taking Louis, the eldest of Catherine’s sons, with him and succeeded in making him the real, instead of only the titular, Prince of Acchaia. On the death of King Robert, leaving the Kingdom to his niece Joan, married to the coarse and illiterate Andrew of Hungary, Niccola and Prince Louis returned to Naples. Joan fell in love with her young cousin, and one morning Andrew was found strangled in his bed. Acciaiuoli, who was supposed to have aided in the murder, became all-powerful when the Queen married Louis of Taranto, and was created Grand Seneschal of the Kingdom, Count of Melfi, etc. He acquired very large possessions in Apulia, Sicily and Greece, and was made Count of Malta and Gozzo, a title he ceded to his son Angiolo during his lifetime. On the occasion of his going to Avignon as ambassador, Pope Innocent VI. gave him the Golden Rose (the first time a private person had been thus honoured), created him a Senator of Rome, Count of the Campagna and Rector of the ecclesiastical patrimony. He next sent him as envoy to Bernabo Visconti at Milan to claim the restitution of Bologna. Finding Bernabo obdurate, Acciaiuoli led the Papal troops against Bologna and installed the Legate there in triumph. He did not forget his own country, for it is to him that we owe the magnificent convent of the Certosa near Florence, where his eldest son, Lorenzo, as handsome and as gifted as his father, was buried in great state in 1354. He also built the villa of Monte Guffone, of which only the shell remains showing how beautiful it once was,[1] and the great Acciaiuoli palace on the Lung’Arno of the same name, adjoining those of other members of the family. As Orcagna was the architect employed at the Certosa he may also have designed Niccola’s fine town house. A cousin of his, Messer Dardano Acciaiuoli, built the church of S. Niccolò in Via della Scala and commissioned Spinello, who, as Vasari tells us, was then (1334) beginning to be known as a good painter, to fresco the whole church with stories from the life of S. Niccolò of Bari. The church was demolished but some of the frescoes are still to be seen in the pharmacy of Sta. Maria Novella.

The Grand Seneschal Niccola Acciaiuoli is described by Matteo Palmieri as being “of more than the ordinary height, lithe, strong, of noble and pleasing presence, with a certain vivacity and gaiety which rendered him a most agreeable companion. His hair was auburn, his eyes large and brilliant, his aspect kindly and smiling; broad in the chest and well made, he used his left hand as dexterously as his right. He dressed well, and when attending any solemn function always wore silk or brocade and had a large following, not, as he was wont to say, for himself, but for the honour of his King. A great lover of arms and of horses, of which he sought to have the best that could be procured, he would, after breaking them in, give them as presents, with magnificent saddles and bridles, to the great personages of the Kingdom. Naturally inclined towards good and noble deeds he was liberal even to prodigality. Many times he risked, not only his patrimony, but his own and his son’s lives in the service of the King. He pardoned far oftener than he avenged evil done to himself. He was sober in eating and drinking, but his table was magnificently furnished for his friends and when he gave public entertainments, as often happened when he returned to visit his own country, where he was received with the highest honours and would give balls, games and other festivals. He led a pure and religious life, observing the fasts ordained by the Church so strictly that on fast days he only ate one piece of dry bread and drank pure water.... His life was a prosperous one, and though he worked hard and suffered infinite privations both by day and by night, he was seldom ill. He died at Naples on November 8, 1365, being fifty-six years of age.”

Of his fine palace there is a delightful description in, I should think, one of the first guide-books written about Florence:—

“In Borgo S.S. Apostoli in the houses of the Acciaiuoli are many statues and many pictures of the greatest beauty by famous artists; more especially in the house of Alessandro are there many things of rare worth. For there is a writing-room adorned with pictures and fine statues, and among them are the twelve Emperors by Giambologna, of such beauty that they are admired beyond measure by artificers who can appreciate them. Besides this there is a garden on strong arches about fifteen braccia high, in a street close to the Arno and looking due south, where the air is soft and pleasant. There in pots and on espaliers are such delightful greenery and fruits, such as lemons and pomegranates, that although the space is not really large, yet the delight it gives is so great that it appears so. Above this, and behind, rising yet higher, is another terrace filled with similar trees; it is marvellous to see the quantity of fruit produced and what good condition it is in. Above, and still farther back is yet another terrace, more than thirty braccia from the ground and the view thence is so beautiful that the soul is rejoiced; wherever a man turns he enjoys the sweet air, full of the perfume of fruit and of flowers which are ever abundant according to their season. Water is lifted by ingenious devices from below up to the third floor garden, so that the moisture when dried up by the heat can be quickly restored. In the lower garden is a beautiful fountain of Carrara marble ornamented with lovely statues. A room, of large dimensions, opens on to this garden, with a fine ceiling and more than thirty portraits of the principal ladies of our city who are famed for their beauty. The pictures, by well-known artists, are highly praised for their execution and their admirable likenesses.”[2]

Niccola Acciaiuoli bequeathed his castles and lands in Greece to Neri, his nephew and adopted son, who after conquering Thebes and the whole of Boeota drove the Spaniards out of Athens, Thebes, Corinth and Megara. The Acciaiuoli ruled Greece for nearly a hundred years, until Mahomet II. took the country and strangled Duke Lionardo. Vespasiano da Bisticci, in his Life of Neri, declares that “others may go about begging nobility for their family, the Acciaiuoli have enough and to spare. They are allied to all the principal houses of the kingdom [Naples]; to the Prince of Taranto and to other lords through the marriages of their women; among them Madonna Andrea degl’ Acciaiuoli, Countess of Altavilla, a woman of singular renown to whom Messer Giovanni Boccaccio sent the book of Illustrious Women, she being possessed of such high authority.”

Many were the Gonfaloniers, Priors and ambassadors, the Acciaiuoli gave to Florence. Donato, whose mother was a daughter of Palla Strozzi, inherited his grandfather’s love of letters, and when ambassador to France presented King Louis XI. with the lives of Charlemagne, Scipio and Hannibal, written by himself. He also wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics, Politics and Physics. He died at Milan whilst on an embassy to the Duke and his body was brought to Florence where Cristofano Landini read the funeral oration in the Duomo. The Republic dowered his two daughters and named Lorenzo de’ Medici and three other citizens guardians of the young sons. One of them, “the prudent and well-endowed” Ruberto, was sent on an embassy to Louis XII., who bestowed on him and his descendants the privilege of adding a Lily of France, surmounted by a royal crown, to his arms. A descendant and a namesake of his is the hero of one of the saddest and most romantic stories of the seventeenth century. Handsome and brave like all his race, the son of Donato Acciaiuoli had long admired Elisabetta Mormorai, wife of Giulio Berardi, and on her husband’s death they agreed to marry. But his uncle the Cardinal had decided that his good-looking nephew was to make an alliance which might be of use to him in his designs upon the Papal chair. So he induced the Grand Duke Cosimo III. to forbid the marriage and to order Elisabetta to enter a convent. Ruberto immediately contracted a canonical marriage with her by letter, and fled to Milan where he published it. At the same time he demanded justice from the Grand Duke, the Archbishop, the Cardinal and his own father. The validity of the marriage was upheld in Lombardy, in Florence it was declared to be a mere engagement and not binding, and the lady was removed from her convent and shut up in a fortress. On the death of the Pope in 1691 Ruberto wrote to the assembled cardinals imploring them, and the future Pope, to do him justice. All Italy was interested in the fate of the lovers and the Cardinal Acciaiuoli tried to throw all the blame on his relations. The Grand Duke set Elisabetta free and she joined her husband at Venice, where Cosimo was openly accused of arbitrary and unjust conduct, and of truckling to the private spite of the Cardinal. He thereupon made formal application to the Republic to deliver up Acciaiuoli and his wife on the plea of lèse majesté. They fled, but were followed by his emissaries and taken into custody at Trent disguised as friars. Ruberto Acciaiuoli was condemned to imprisonment for life in the fortress of Volterra and to the loss of his patrimony, whilst to Elisabetta was offered the choice of repudiating her marriage or of being confined in the women’s part of the same prison. In the hopes of mitigating the severity of her husband’s sentence she chose the former, and died of grief a few months later.

TOWER OF THE ALBERTI.

The family were supposed to be extinct in 1760, but at this date Senhor De Vasconcellos came from Madeira and proved his descent from an Acciaiuoli who had settled in the island at the end of the XVth century. He married the orphan daughter of the last of the Florentine Acciaiuoli and took her name, but the family came to an end when Monsignore Filippo, a learned prelate, died at Venice in 1834.

PALAZZO ALBERTI
Via de’ Benci. No. 2.

Varchi tells us that the palaces of the Alberti were built on the site of those of the ancient family of Quona, near the town gate called after Messer Ruggieri da Quona. The picturesque little Café delle Colonnine, which in the XVth century was the workshop of Niccolò Grossi, marks where their loggia once stood, and the palaces of various members of the family extended from Piazza Sta. Croce to the river, in what was then the Via degl’Alberti. On the façade of the palace where Leon Battista Alberti lived, which was entirely modernized in 1838 by the architect V. Bellini, who then built the colonnade which divides the garden from the Lung’Arno, are two engraved marble slabs with plans of what it once was and what it is now.

The great family of the Alberti originally came from Catenaia in the Casentino, where they owned castles and lands. It is probable that their arms, four silver chains (catene), joined in the middle by a silver ring, are derived from the name of their castle. Five different families of Alberti, with different arms, are mentioned in the annals of Florence; but the Alberti whose palaces stood near the Ponte alle Grazie, from whom sprang that many-sided genius Leon Battista, bore the surname of Giudici from an Alberto who held the office of judge in Florence in the early days of the XIIIth century, and came, as has already been said, from Catenaia. The Alberti were always Guelphs, they went into exile after the battle of Montaperti and their houses were destroyed. Alberto, son of Messer Jacopo, was a Prior when the first stone of the Palazzo de’ Signori was laid in 1294 (the first of forty-nine of his house), while the number of Alberti who were prelates, ambassadors, gallant captains and knights of the Golden Spur, is innumerable. The death of Messer Niccolò degl’ Alberti in 1377, then one of the most illustrious and one of the richest citizens of Florence, was a public disaster. He had acquired the name of Father of the Poor and his funeral was attended by hundreds of families dressed in black, who mourned their benefactor. Near to his house in Via degl’Alfani (where a corner is still called Canto alla Catena from his coat of arms) he built, after the design of Agnolo Gaddi, a hospital called Orbetello for poor old women and fallen girls.

When in 1380 Giorgio Scali and Tommaso Strozzi attacked the Palazzo del Podestà and set Giovanni di Cambio free, the Signori thought it was time, as Machiavelli writes, “to liberate the city from the insolence of Messer Giorgio and of the mob. But they deemed it necessary to get the consent of Messer Benedetto Alberti (son of Niccolò). He was an exceeding rich man, humane, stern, a lover of the liberty of his country and averse to all tyrannical proceedings; it was therefore not difficult to obtain his consent to the ruin of Messer Giorgio.... Having ascertained that Messer Benedetto and the heads of the Guilds would side with them the Signori armed, and Messer Giorgio was taken while Messer Tommaso fled. The following day Messer Giorgio, to the terror of his party was beheaded.... Seeing Messer Benedetto Alberti among the armed men, he said: ‘And thou, Messer Benedetto, allowest that such an injury be done to me, which I, were I in thy place, would never have permitted to be done to thee? But I tell thee that to-day is the end of my woes and the beginning of thine own.’”

The Guelphs now ruled supreme. Executions and sentences of exile against the nobili popolani and the leaders of the people were of daily occurrence, to the great chagrin of Benedetto who made no secret of his displeasure. “Therefore the heads of the State,” continues Machiavelli, “feared him, esteeming him one of the friends of the people, and thinking he had acquiesced in the death of Messer Giorgio Scali, not because he disapproved of his conduct, but in order to be the sole leader.” The pomp and magnificence displayed by the Alberti a few years later, when crowned with gold, clad in white brocade and mounted on magnificent horses caparisoned with the same stuff, they rode through the streets of Florence and held jousts in honour of the acquisition of Arezzo, caused intense envy. When the name of Magalotti Benedetto’s son-in-law, was drawn from the borse as Gonfalonier of Justice he was set aside, and Bardo Mancini, an avowed enemy of the Alberti, was named in his stead. Not many days afterwards Benedetto was exiled, and with him Cipriano, “a most prudent citizen.” The former died at Rhodes in 1388, “and his bones,” says Machiavelli, “were brought to Florence and buried with the greatest honour by those who had pursued him with calumny and evil during his life.” When the Albizzi became all-powerful the popolani were persecuted. Benedetto’s sons were despoiled of their possessions and two were sentenced to be beheaded if they fell into the hands of the Podestà. Antonio Alberti was tortured, but escaped with his life and, “in order that the Alberti should not create disorders every day in the city,” he, his brothers and his sons were made grandi, which excluded them from holding any office. Lorenzo, another son of Benedetto, and seven of the family were exiled to 180 miles from Florence and all males above sixteen to 100 miles, under threat of severe punishment if they approached nearer to the city, or pledged or sold any of their property. Of course they conspired, and in 1412 every male, down to the smallest child, was exiled. Any Florentine who dared to harbour an Alberti was fined, while any who killed one of the hated family above eighteen years of age within the Florentine territory, received a recompense and the permission to carry arms. Any citizen marrying an Alberti or allowing his daughter to do so, was to be fined 1,000 florins; none were to trade with them, their loggia was destroyed and an inventory made of their property, which was seized as a guarantee that the exiles would behave properly. After the taxes had been paid and the dowers of the girls deducted, the income that remained was doled out to the respective owners.

Leon Battista tells us that his ancestors met their evil fate courageously; “meeting often and consulting together with fraternal affection, full of charity and good offices.... Their number, their intelligence, their assiduity in making friends by kindliness and giving help to many men, caused them to be much liked. They despised,” he continues, “the habit common to so many of saying that it is enough to know how to sign one’s name and to sum up what is owing.... It became a proverbial saying in Italy when a man was courteous and well-bred, such a one is as though born and brought up among the Alberti.... They were merchants, trafficking in noble and honest merchandize, and no pedlars; dealing in France and England in cloth and wool, as do the highest and the worthiest men of the city, an occupation that is good and honourable and he that engages in it is well-considered and respected in the land.”[3] The Alberti had houses of business at Bruges, Ghent, Brussels and in various French and English towns, as well as in Greece, Syria, Spain and all the Mediterranean ports. By their rigid integrity and their refusal to enter into speculative loans as the Bardi, Peruzzi and others, had done, they augmented their riches even whilst in exile. When Pope John XXII. called upon them to pay within eight days 80,000 golden florins deposited in their London bank, Ricciardo Alberti handed the sum to him in Bologna on the fifth day, it having been sent from Venice by his brother Lorenzo. Their condition however was a sad one. Fugitives, scattered over the face of the earth and far from home and friends, their joy must have been great, when Cosimo de’ Medici on his return to power in 1434 recalled them to Florence. By his influence Alberto Alberti was created a cardinal, and their name appears constantly in the magistrature under the Medici.

Lorenzo Alberti, son of Benedetto, seems to have established himself for a time at Genoa where Leon Battista was born, probably in 1404 (some give 1398 as the date of his birth and others 1414). He was educated at Bologna and had a hard struggle after his father’s death in 1421, as the relations in whose charge he and his brother were left cheated them out of their patrimony. Brought up for the church, he was ordained a priest and at twenty became a Canon of the cathedral of Florence. But intense study brought on a disorder of the nerves which caused loss of memory, and he applied himself to mathematics and the physical sciences, and adopted architecture as his profession. He invented several mechanical instruments, the Reticola de’ dipintori, the Bolide Albertiana and the Camera optica, a precursor of the Camera obscura.[4] His principal prose work is the Trattato della Famiglia, three books of which are said by the anonymous writer of his life to have been composed in Rome in ninety days. “Taken in its whole extent,” remarks J. A. Symonds, “this treatise is the most valuable document which remains to us from the times of the oligarchy.... From its pages a tolerably complete history of a great commercial family might be extracted; and this study would form a valuable commentary on the public annals of the commonwealth during the earlier portion of the XVth century.”

Much discussion was aroused, and still continues, about the fourth book of the Trattato, published by D. M. Manni in 1734 as the work of Agnolo Pandolfini under the title of Trattato del Governo della Famiglia. Pandolfini has champions like Signor Virginio Cortesi, who in his Studio Critico ably pleads his cause. But the Governo della Famiglia is now generally acknowledged to be by Alberti, in whose Trattato it figures as the third book, under the name of the Economico, or the Padre della Famiglia. Professors Alessandro d’Ancona and Orazio Bacci, in their admirable manual of Italian literature[5] write: “It may be considered as definitely proved that the Governo della Famiglia” (as it is usually called) “is nothing more than a travestied and altered copy, often not to its advantage, of the third book of the Famiglia written about 1460.”[6] Alberti was a strenuous advocate for writing in Italian; “I admit willingly,” he says, “that the ancient Latin tongue is very copious and of a beauty polished to perfection. Yet I do not see what our Tuscan contains so hateful, that worthy matter, when conveyed therein, should be displeasing to us.” In the dedication of his essay on painting to Filippo Brunelleschi the same note is struck with regard to the arts. After sorrowing over the loss of many arts and sciences and fearing that Nature is weary and worn out, he exclaims: “But when I returned from the long exile, in which we of the Alberti have grown old, to this our mother city which exceeds all others in the beauty of her monuments, I perceived that many living men, but first of all you, Filippo, and our dearest friend Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Luca della Robbia and Masaccio, were not of less account for genius and noble work than any ancient artist of great fame.” Leon Battista Alberti died in Rome in 1472, and no stone marks the spot where one of the greatest Florentines lies, though one of his descendants put up a monument to him in Florence.

“He indeed might serve,” writes Symonds, “as the very type of those many-sided, precocious and comprehensive men of genius who only existed in the Renaissance. Physical strength and dexterity were given to him at birth in measure equal to his mental faculties. It is recorded that he could jump standing over an upright man, pierce the strongest armour with his arrows, and so deftly fling a coin that it touched the highest point of a church or palace roof. The wildest horses are said to have trembled under him, as though brutes felt, like men, the magnetism of his personality. His insight into every branch of art was innate. At the age of twenty he composed the comedy of “Philodoxius” which passed for an antique, and was published by the Aldi in 1588 as the work of Lepidus Comicus. Of music, though he had not made it a special study he was a thorough master, composing melodies that gave delight to scientific judges. He painted pictures, and wrote three books on painting; practised architecture and compiled ten books on building. Of his books nothing remains; but the church of S. Andrea at Mantua, the Palazzo Rucellai at Florence, and the remodelled Church of S. Francesco at Rimini attest his greatness as an architect.”[7]

The palaces of the Alberti were numerous, and they built or decorated chapels in the churches of Sta. Croce, the Carmine, S. Miniato al Monte, degl’Angeli and others. Their villas were superb, especially the Paradiso degl’Alberti, described in one of Giovanni da Prato’s tales.[8] Under the dynasty of Lorraine eight of the family attained the dignity of Senator, and in 1758 Giovan-Vincenzio Alberti was created a Count Palatine by the Emperor Francis. His son, named Leon Battista after his illustrious ancestor, died in 1836 the last of his race, leaving his name and his property to Cav. Mario Moriubaldini.

PALAZZO ALBIZZI
Borgo degl’Albizzi. No. 12.

The name of Albizzi appears for the first time in the annals of Florence in 1251, when Benincasa di Albizzo was an Elder. In 1282 Ser Compagno was the first of the long list of ninety-eight Priors of the house of Albizzi who sat in the Palazzo de’ Signori. Piero, the son of Filippo, the first Gonfalonier of Justice of thirteen the family gave to Florence, became immensely rich and by his prudence and sagacity obtained such preponderance in the affairs of the city that he was the recognized head of the nobili popolani. Acute rivalry between the Ghibelline Albizzi and the Ricci, who were Guelphs, had always existed; and Uguccione de’ Ricci, thinking to crush his rivals, advocated the revival of the magistrature of the Captains of the Guelph party, proposing at the same time that all who professed themselves Ghibellines should be admonished, i. e. excluded from all offices of state. Piero di Albizzo, to hide his Ghibelline tendencies, not only made no opposition, but took a foremost part in the doings of the tribunal, which became odious to the Florentines under his presidency. The Ciompi revolt was the direct consequence of the tyranny of the Captains of the Guelph party, Piero was beheaded and the other members of the Albizzi family were banished, only to return more powerful when the old system of government was revived in 1381. According to Passerini it was to the wise administration of Maso, Piero’s nephew, that the prosperity and the greatness of Florence, feared and respected by the other Italian Republics, were due. “He formed political relations apt to preserve the prosperity of the Republic, built great public edifices, protected nascent studies and arts and promoted the foundation of the Florentine University, the basis of the literary glory afterwards culled by the Medici family. The wars against the Visconti were prosecuted with constancy and without losses; indeed the state was enlarged, a thing which could not have happened amid such conflicting opinions as then reigned in Florence, if the man at the head of affairs had not been a politician of the first order.”[9] Maso degl’Albizzi died in 1417 and his son Rinaldo inherited part of his father’s vast wealth and his ambition, but not his caution. The oligarchy of the nobili popolani became odious under his leadership, and the strong party led, but not ostensibly, by Cosmo de’ Medici, divided the city into two hostile factions. The death of that wise old citizen Niccolò da Uzzano, who had kept Rinaldo in check was, writes Machiavelli, “a misfortune for Florence, as Messer Rinaldo, thinking now to be head of the party, never ceased entreating and worrying all the citizens he thought might become Gonfaloniers, to rise and liberate the country from the man destined, through the malignity of some and the ignorance of the many, to enslave it.” Albizzi’s friend, Bernardo Guadagni, whose debts he paid in order to enable him to become Gonfalonier of Justice in September, 1433, confined Cosimo de’ Medici in the Palazzo de’ Signori and then exiled him for ten years. “Meanwhile,” writes Machiavelli, “in Florence, widowed of a citizen so great and so universally beloved, everyone was confounded. Conquerors as well as conquered were afeard;” and Rinaldo and his friends were beginning to realize “that great men should not be assailed, but so be they are assailed they should be done away with.” They attempted to retrieve their mistake by proscribing many of Cosimo’s party, and the government, occupied with private quarrels and enmities, became futile and uncertain. In September the following year, a Signoria devoted to the Medici was elected, and Rinaldo degl’Albizzi urged his party to take up arms. Whereupon the Gonfalonier summoned him and others of the Grandi to appear before him. Instead of obeying the order they collected their followers and with a strong armed force invaded the Piazza. The old palace of the Signori was at once closed and barricaded, and civil war seemed imminent.

It was averted only by the intervention of Eugenius IV. then living as a refugee in Florence. He sent Giovanni Vitelleschi, Bishop of Recanati, to beg Rinaldo degl’Albizzi to come to him and assured him there was no question of recalling Cosimo de’ Medici, and that if he went quietly home all would be well. Rinaldo was kept so long that his followers got tired and dispersed, leaving the Signoria masters of the situation. Sentences of banishment against Albizzi, his son Ormanno, Ridolfo Peruzzi, Palla Strozzi and many others of the Grandi were passed, and before they left the city Eugenius sent once more for Rinaldo and “told him,” writes Machiavelli, “that he blamed himself for the evil that had befallen him through trusting his word; exhorting him to have patience and to hope for a change of fortune. To which Messer Rinaldo replied, the small confidence shewn by those who ought to have trusted me, and the too great faith I put in you, have been the ruin of myself, of my party. But above all do I blame myself for believing that you, who were driven out of your own country, could keep me in mine. I have had ample experience of the tricks of Fortune; prosperity I never trusted much, so adversity does not affect me. I know that when Fortune pleases she will be kinder, but should she continue unkind, I care not to live in a city where men are above the law. For a country in which riches and friends can be enjoyed in security, is preferable to one in which you can easily be deprived of the former, and where your friends, for fear of losing their all, abandon you in your direst need. It was ever less hard for discreet and good men to hear tell of their countries’ woes, than to see them, and an honourable rebel is more esteemed than an enslaved citizen. So, full of ire, he left the Pope, thinking how fruitless his counsels had been and how cold his friends, and went into exile.” He died at Ancona in 1452.

His brother Luca, on the contrary, was an ardent adherent of the Medici and his descendants filled important posts under the Republic. The stern, grey palace, now divided into many houses, at the eastern end of Borgo degl’Albizzi, under which passes a small street was, I believe, built by him for one of his sons. The Albizzi arms, two golden rings one inside the other under a cross of the Teutonic order, are still to be seen on the façade. The Marquess Vittorio degl’Albizzi, to whose memory there is an inscription on the great family palace, was the last of his race.

PALAZZO ALESSANDRI
Borgo degl’Albizzi. No. 15.

In 1372 Alessandro and Bartolomeo degl’Albizzi quarrelled with their brothers, and obtained the consent of the Signori to take the name of Alessandri and to adopt another coat of arms. They chose the emblem of the Guild of Wool to which they belonged, adding a second head to the well-known lamb. Later the house of Aragon bestowed upon them the privilege of adding a golden crown and palm leaves to their shield. Twenty-three Priors and nine Gonfaloniers of Justice of the family sat in the Palazzo de’ Signori and many of them were sent on important embassies. Alessandro degl’Alessandri was knighted by the Emperor Frederick IV., while his brother Bartolomeo gained such favour with the King of Naples that he made him Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1439 the Emperor Paleologus bestowed the title of Count on one of the Alessandri and some eighty years later Leo X. created them Counts of the Holy Roman Empire, a title confirmed by Gregory XVI. in 1845.

On either side of the windows on the upper floor of this palace are still to be seen the iron cramps which supported the frames on the roofs for drying cloth, source of the family riches. Part of the palace was burned during the Ciompi riots while it still belonged to the Albizzi; the side which was saved is distinguished by the pointed arches of the windows. The Alessandri were great patrons of horse racing—as racing was understood in those days—and owned a famous barb “Il Gran Diavolo,” who won for them many of the magnificent palii of cloth of gold and velvet with which some of the rooms are hung. The ladies of the family must often have stood at the windows clapping their hands with delight at the victory of the fiery black horses which carried their colours, for the winning-post was just beyond the old palace. The race in Borgo degl’Albizzi on the 24th June, the day of St. John, patron saint of Florence, is thus described by Goro Dati. “After dinner when midday had passed and everyone had slept, enjoying themselves, the women and children go to where the racers, who are to contend for the Palio, pass through a straight street in the centre of the city where are the finest houses of the chief citizens; and from one end to the other the said street is full of flowers, and all the women and the jewels and the richest ornaments of the city, and great is the rejoicing. Many lords, cavaliers and foreign gentlemen come every year to see the fine festival, and the number of people, foreigners and citizens, is incredible, and not to be believed save by one who has seen them. At the sound of three strokes of the bell of the Palazzo de’ Signori the horses start, and on the tower are stationed boys, who by certain signals show to whom belong the horses, which have come from all parts of Italy and are the most famous Barbary racers in the world. The winner is he who first reaches the Palio, which is borne on a four-wheeled triumphal car, with a lion at each corner. So well are they sculptured that they seem alive. It is drawn by two richly-caparisoned horses, with the emblems of their Commune. The rich and large Palio, of two lengths of the finest crimson velvet joined together by gold insertion a handsbreadth wide, lined with miniver, bordered with ermine and a gold and silken fringe, altogether cost 300 and more golden florins. But of late it has been made of brocade woven with gold, most beautiful, and of the value of 600 florins or even more.”[10]

The old palace is still inhabited by the Counts Alessandri.

CASTELLO D’ALTAFRONTE
Piazza de’ Giudicci. No. 1.

In 1180 Schiatta degl’Uberti, whose family had houses and towers near the present Piazza de’ Giudicci, sold one fourth part, pro indiviso, of the castle to one of the Altafronte family. The sons of Lottieri d’Altafronte, who seemed to have been in perpetual need of money, borrowed from various people, and were at last obliged to sell it, as appears by an act of 1304, when Cecchino Bardi became “master of a habitation in the parish of S. Piero Scheraggio, called the castle of Altafronte, surrounded on all sides by streets.”

In 1333, according to Gaddi, the castle was devastated and ruined, together with many other houses, by the terrible flood which carried away the old statue of Mars near the Ponte Vecchio. It must have been at once restored, as fifteen years later a certain Bencivieni Buonsostegni, to whom it then belonged, made a will forbidding his descendants to alienate it; in case they did so it was to go to the Commune. His sons having to pay their sister’s dower petitioned for leave to sell, which was granted. The Commune itself may have been the purchaser, as there is a petition from the Operai, or clerks of the works, of the Duomo, who were obliged to buy houses and lands in order to continue the building of Sta. Maria del Fiore, complaining that the 4,500 florins promised to them, had been spent in rebuilding the walls of the castle of Altafronte, three towers and the Porta d’Arno.[11] It then passed into the possession of the Castellani family, one of whom left the castle, together with a farm at Rome, to the hospital of Sta. Maria at Ripoli. But either the family bought it back or the testator could only leave a part of the great building, as when Matteo Castellani died, and was buried with the greatest pomp in Sta. Croce in 1429, “his son Francesco was publicly knighted by the side of his father’s bier; his mourning habiliments were torn off in the church and, habited as a cavalier, the other knights of the order accompanied him most honourably to his palace.” Ten years later Demetrio Paleologo, Despot of the Morea, took up his abode there when he accompanied his brother the Emperor to the Council of Florence.

In 1558 the Grand Duke Cosimo I. bought the castle of Altafronte from the Castellani, and fourteen years later, under the reign of Francesco I., it became the residence of the Judges of the Ruota, and the shops near by were turned into offices for the notaries. In 1858 many wretched houses, with the arms of the judges and the notaries on their façades, which had sprung up in the Piazza de’ Castellani, were swept away, and two years later the wall of the Lung’Arno della Borsa was built.

Opposite to the Castello d’Altafronte, which is now part of the National Library, is a marble slab in the parapet wall of the Arno with an inscription which often arouses the curiosity of the passers-by.

OSSA EQUI CAROLA CAPELLI
LEGATI VENETI
NON INGRATUS HERUS SONIPES MEMORANDE SEPULCRUM
HOC TIBI PRO MERITIS HAEC MONUMENTA DEDIT
OBSESSA URBE
M.D.XXX.III ID MARTII

It marks the grave of the favourite horse of Carlo Cappello, who was the Venetian ambassador during the siege of Florence in 1529. Varchi says, “he was most popular in the city and much loved, not only for his many good qualities, being a man of letters, but also because when Luigi Alamanni and Zanobi Buondelmonti were declared rebels, on account of the conspiracy against the Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, he gave them hospitality in his house at Venice; and afterwards, when they had been imprisoned at Brescia at the request of Pope Clemente, he so managed that they were set free and sent on their way, the Venetians either not knowing, or pretending not to know, who they were.”

The horse was buried with his fine velvet housings in the Piazza d’Arno, close to the old city gate.

PALAZZO ALTOVITI
Borgo degl’Albizzi. No. 18.

This palace was built by Rinaldo degl’Albizzi, Cosimo de’ Medici’s great rival, next to that of his father, and after his exile it was bought by the Valori. Taldo de Valore, four times a Prior, and Gonfalonier of Justice in 1340, was the grandfather of the influential citizen Bartolomeo, one of the Dieci di Guerra, and thrice Gonfalonier. One of his sons, Niccolò, devoted to the Medici, was elected to the most important offices under the Republic. Francesco, his grandson, four times Gonfalonier of Justice and ambassador to various foreign powers, was killed in 1498 when Savonarola, of whom he was a staunch partisan, was arrested. To Filippo Valori, a friend of Lorenzo the Magnificent and of all the circle of brilliant men who surrounded him, we owe the publication of Marsilio Ficino’s translation of Plato; whilst his son Baccio was “that worst of bad citizens” who conspired against the liberties of Florence in favour of the Medici, and was then set aside by the Duke Alesandro. Being, as Varchi writes, “of an unquiet, prodigal, and rapacious nature and not well off, he could not live as a gentleman and satisfy his wants, which were infinite, without holding some high office in the city; so his discontent was extreme.” He joined the party of the exiles and was taken prisoner together with Filippo Strozzi at Montemurlo. Bernardo Segni describes how “all the people ran down the Via Larga to the house of the Medici to see the miserable and affecting sight of Baccio on a sorry nag, in a rusty coat of mail and without a cap; he who but a short time before had been so fortunate a Commissary-General at the camp, and for so many months master in Florence, and afterwards Governor of various provinces; and Filippo Strozzi, who had been accounted the first man in Italy and honoured for every great quality, on a similar beast, in a leathern jerkin and coarse cloth overcoat. It seemed a spiteful, dishonest trick of fortune. Antonfrancesco degl’Albizzi excited no less compassion. Of a most noble family and proud by nature, he had ruled Florence like a Prince, had changed her government, and now was led on foot meanly and had shameful words cast at him by the onlookers. All dismounted at the fortunate house of the Medici and were led before the Lord Cosimo, being vilified and insulted by the sycophants and abettors of the Pallesca grandeur. Kneeling humbly before the Lord Cosimo and before his mother, they begged heartily for pardon; he replied in a few quiet words, with an aspect rather kindly and benign than angry and cruel.... Five were beheaded on that day [20 August, 1535], to wit Baccio, Filippo his son, Filippo his nephew, Antonfrancesco degl’Albizzi and Alessandro Rondinelli. Messer Alessandro Malgonelle, who, being one of the Eight, was present when they were examined and tortured, with great joyfulness said aloud in public: ‘To-day we have wrung the necks of four thrushes and of one blackbird; the blackbird being Rondinelli, who was inferior to the others in birth and riches.’”[12] Niccolò Valori, member of the Platonic Academy, was Commissary at Pistoja in 1501, and soon afterwards ambassador to Louis XII. of France, who named him a chamberlain and a councillor. In 1507 he was sent on an embassy to Ferdinand the Catholic at Naples, and in the same year became Commissary of the Tuscan Romagna. Five years later he was accused of conspiring against the Medici together with Boscoli and Capponi, and sentenced to life-long imprisonment in the tower of Volterra. His grandson obtained his release by presenting Leo X. with the life of his father, Lorenzo de’ Medici, written by him.

Baccio Valori, son of Filippo, who perished by the headman’s axe, was a man of vast culture and a distinguished lawyer. He enlarged the old palace and collected a magnificent library. In a vellum bound booklet, beautifully printed in 1604, his son Filippo describes how Baccio, “after enlarging his house (without departing from the ancient lines), thought well to decorate it outside with other antiquities befitting both the land of his birth and himself as a man of letters.” These antiquities are fifteen busts of illustrious Florentines sculptured in marble in alto-rilievo, and set upon termini. In the lower row are Accursio, Torrigiano Rustichelli, surnamed de’ Valori, Marsilio Ficino, Donato Acciaiuoli, and Pier Vettori. In the alcoves between the first floor windows are Amerigo Vespucci, Leon Battista Alberti, Francesco Guicciardini, Marcello Adriano, and Vincenzio Borghini. Above are Dante, Petraca, Boccaccio, Giovanni della Casa, and Luigi Alamanni. In the corridor, “as being a more honourable place,” observes Filippo, were the Archbishop S. Antonino, S. Filippo Neri, Maestro Luigi Marsili, Lorenzo il Magnifico and Bartolomeo Cavalcanti, and a bust of Baccio Valori himself—the only one left. From the busts on the façade the palace is generally known in Florence as the Palazzo de’ Visacci, or of the Ugly Faces.

Alessandro, the last of the Valori, died in 1687, and his nephew, Senator Luigi Guicciardini, inherited the palace. In 1703 he bought two small houses with stables behind, between it and the great Pazzi palace (pulled down to build the Banca d’Italia), and in 1723 a large house on the other side. His only daughter, Virginia, married Giovan Gaetano Altoviti, who incorporated the houses on either side and renovated the interior of the palace, which then took his name. The ceilings of two of the rooms were frescoed by pupils of Luca Giordano, and round the walls of one room are terra-cotta medallions, portraits of the Altoviti and the Guicciardini. One of them, wearing the well-known Florentine lucco, represents the great historian, Francesco Guicciardini.

Enea Silvio Piccolomini (Pius II.), on the strength of an inscription said to have been found at Fiesole which begins: FURIUS CAMILLUS ALTIVITA—MAGNI FURII CAMILLI NEPOS—assigned a Roman origin to the Altoviti; but Passerini believes the inscription is a medieval forgery. The first mention of the family in the Florentine archives is in 1154, when Corbizzo, son of Gollo, bought a house and a tower in the suburb of S. Niccolò. His grandson Davanzato purchased an estate at Antella and a tower in the suburb of S.S. Apostoli, he and his brothers having certain rights of patronage over the church and the cemetery of S.S. Apostoli. These rights were contested by the Prior of the church, who challenged Davanzato to decide the question by a duel; however Honorius III. interposed and by a decree addressed to the Podestà and the people of Florence threatened to excommunicate anyone who took up arms. From Davanzato’s son Altovito, a judge of considerable repute, the family take their name. The Emperor Frederick II., to whom he was sent on an embassy, held him in high esteem and knighted him with his own hand in 1227. The eldest of Altovito’s sons, Guinizzingo, commonly called Tingo, was the first of a long series of Gonfaloniers of Justice the family gave to Florence, and during his rule the first stone of Sta. Maria Novella was laid on May 3, 1294. Oddo, another of Altovito’s sons, was a judge like his father and his name figures often as either ambassador or Elder until after the battle of Montaperti, at which he was present, his palace and tower were destroyed by the Ghibellines.[13] But when the Guelphs returned to power in 1278, we find him once more among the Elders, and two years later he was sent to Pope Nicholas III. to beg him to put an end to the internecine war between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Oddo degl’Altoviti took an active part in the transactions and signed the treaty for the Guelph party in the Mozzi palace in 1281. He warmly supported the new law that all who aspired to office under the Republic should belong to a Guild, so the nobles, who were chiefly Ghibellines, inscribed themselves in the books of the Guilds without personally exercising any trade, and thus eluded the law. The popolani then rose, with Giano della Bella at their head, and demanded reform. Oddo degl’Altoviti and his cousin Palmiere assisted in drawing up the famous Ordinamenti della Giustizia, the object of which was to exclude the nobles from power and to ensure the summary and severe punishment of any noble who injured a plebeian.[14] Palmiere was one of the companions of Dante on an embassy to Boniface VIII. to beg him to try and pacify the citizens of Florence, and like him died in exile. Oddo’s son Bindo, took an active part in the government of the city. He was many times a Prior and twice Captain of War, fighting against Henry VII., and afterwards against Castruccio. At Altopascio he was made prisoner and only regained his liberty after the death of the great Lucchese. He was often sent as ambassador to various Italian cities, but disgraced his name by the ferocity he showed in torturing the followers of the Duke of Athens in 1343. One of the leaders of the revolt against the tyrant he was foremost in inciting the people to brutal and loathsome acts of cruelty. His niece Giovanna, married to Benci Aldobrandini, deserves mention as a remarkable woman, of such wisdom and intelligence that the magistrates always consulted her when in any difficulty. She was simply called “Madonna,” as we might say, “the Lady,” and the square where her husband’s house stood still bears the name of Piazza Madonna.

Antonio degl’Altoviti passed nearly all his life at Rome and married a niece of Innocent VIII., whose banker he was. To him the Pope gave, to the exclusion of the other branches of the family, the absolute patronage of the church of S.S. Apostoli, where he was buried in 1508 in the fine tomb sculptured by Benedetto da Rovezzano for his brother Oddo. Bindo, his son, who succeeded him in business, made an enormous fortune, and was the friend of all the great artists of that time. Michelangelo gave him the cartoon for one of the frescoes of the Sistine chapel, and is said to have modelled the rare medal showing Bindo Altoviti’s head on one side and one of his emblems, a woman clinging to a column surrounded by waves, on the reverse. Raphael painted his portrait as a young man, and executed for him the Madonna dell’Impanata now in the gallery of the Pitti palace. Bevenuto Cellini modelled and cast his bust in bronze,[15] while Jacopo Sansovino designed a magnificent fireplace for his palace in Florence, which Benedetto da Rovezzano decorated with delicate bas-reliefs. Vasari also worked for him, painting the altar picture in the Altoviti chapel in S. S. Apostoli and two loggie in his palace at Rome. A violent antagonist of the Medici he not only expended large sums in aid of the exiles, but sent one of his sons to fight under Piero Strozzi against Cosimo I. at Siena. Another son, Antonio, entered the church and was made Archbishop of Florence by Paul III., very much as an act of hostility towards Cosimo, who retaliated by sequestering the revenues of the archbishopric and forbidding Altoviti to enter Tuscany. It was only in 1568, owing to the intervention of Pius V., that he was at length enabled to take possession of his see. His entrance into the city and his spiritual marriage with the Abbess of S. Pier Maggiore were conducted with such solemnity and pomp that Cosimo was profoundly irritated, and decreed that the ancient ceremony of the mystic nuptials of the Archbishop and the Abbess should be for ever abolished. Canon Moreni has published an account by an eyewitness of how the guardians, or patrons, of the archbishopric, with all the clergy, met Altoviti at the gate of the city bearing long staves, with green garlands on their heads and gloves on their hands. One of the Strozzi family led his palfrey and, passing through the principal streets, the procession went to the church of S. Pier Maggiore (now destroyed). Dismounting, the Archbishop was conducted to the high altar, when his palfrey was taken possession of by the Abbess’s factor while its rich housings fell to the Strozzi. After saying mass the Archbishop retired to a room prepared for him “where was spread a sumptuous refection suited to so noble a lord.” He then returned to the church, and after a brief oration to the assembled nuns wedded the Abbess with a golden ring. That night he slept in the convent in a magnificent bed, specially prepared by the Abbess, which he took away to his own palace next day.[16]

Giovan Battista degl’Altoviti lived chiefly in Rome and was the intimate friend of the last scion of the Spanish family of Avila who made him his heir, with the obligation of adding the name of Avila to his own. With the death of the Marquess Corbizzo Altoviti-Avila, who left no son, the ancient family is extinct.

Under a window on the ground floor of the palace is an inscription recording a miracle performed by S. Zenobius. Here the saint met the funeral of a young child whose mother, a lady from Gaul, was walking beside the bier and weeping so bitterly that his heart was touched. Bidding the men stop and put down the bier, S. Zenobius laid his hands on the dead child and prayed, and the boy awoke and stretching forth his hand clasped his mother round the neck. The shrine of the saint at the corner of the Lambertesca palace is said to have been erected by her.

PALAZZO DELL’ANTELLA
Piazza Sta. Croce. No. 23.

This picturesque palace was built by Giulio Parigi for the Senator Niccolò dell’Antella, who commissioned thirteen artists to fresco the façade.[17] The upper part was painted in 1619 in fifteen days, as is recorded on a scroll held by one of the figures, while the lower part was finished the following year in eight. The frescoes by Giovanni da San Giovanni were considered the best, i. e. the arms of the Antella family surrounded by three amorini; the various deities and virtues, amongst which is the figure of an old man with an owl by his side, the reputed portrait of Donato dell’Antella, father of the Senator Niccolò; and a Cupid asleep with a swan. The whole façade is sadly dilapidated, and the frescoes are fast disappearing. Below the third window on the ground floor is a marble disk, said by some to mark where the dividing line was drawn across the Piazza when the game of calcio was played. But, as far as I can understand the extremely technical account of the game by Count Giovanni de’Bardi, surnamed il Puro in the Academia degl’Alterati,[18] it marks the spot against which the ball was thrown at the beginning of each game. He describes the Piazza, as fenced in by posts and rails 2 braccia high; the length of the campo, or field of play, being 172 braccia, and the width 86. One side of the enclosure was called the muro, or wall, the other the fossa, or ditch, and in the centre of one side the six umpires were “on an honourable and elevated seat,” while at either end stood a pavilion draped with the colours of the players. Of these there were fifty-four, twenty-seven on either side, dressed in their distinctive colours, under the command of alfieri, or captains, and divided as follows: fifteen innanzi, or “forwards,” also called corridori, in three companies of five each, who followed the ball; five sconciatori, or “half-backs,” whose duty it was to prevent the innanzi from getting the ball (they often gave heavy blows, whence their name, from the word sconciare, to injure or hurt); four datori innanzi, or “three-quarters,” and three datori addietro, or “full-backs,” a kind of rear-guard to the former. I must refer my readers to Mr. Heywood’s delightful book Palio and Ponte for a full and vivid account of the game of calcio, from which I extract the following lines. “The object of the players was to drive the ball, with feet or fists, over what, for convenience sake, we may term the enemy’s ‘goal-line,’ although, as a matter of fact, in the Florentine game there were no goals, the whole line of posts and rails, at either end of the field of play, being open to attack. In order to score, it was necessary that the ball should be driven over this line by a direct punt or a fist blow. This was called a caccia, and the game was won by the side which gained the greatest number of caccie. The players were allowed to run with the ball, to kick, strike or throw it; but if, when thrown or struck with the open hand, it rose above the height of an ordinary man, this constituted a fallo, or fault; and two falli were equal to a caccia. There was also a fallo when the ball was driven out of the field of play, on the side of the Ditch, by a direct punt or fist blow; if, however, it bounced out off the ground, there was no penalty. After a caccia or two falli had been scored, ends were changed.” The victors then marched with their banner proudly displayed, while that of their adversaries was furled and slanted earthwards. This was a dangerous moment, as the conquered party sometimes refused to lower their banner, whereupon the others would fall upon them and tear it to pieces, and men were often severely wounded. The players were picked men, as “scoundrels are not to be tolerated,” writes the Count Giovanni, “neither artificers, servants, low-born nor infamous fellows, but honourable soldiers, gentlemen, lords and princes. Therefore to play Calcio, gentlemen from eighteen to forty-five years of age shall be chosen, well-matched, handsome, vigorous, of gallant bearing and of good repute.... It is not convenient for the player to wear aught save hose and doublet, a cap and light shoes, because the less he is hampered the more agile will he be, and the better able to use his limbs and to run swiftly. Above all should every one be careful to have handsome, elegant and well-fitting attire.”

Mr. Heywood, in the book I have quoted, scouts the notion that our national game of football came originally from Italy, where he says it was unknown before the XVth century. On the contrary, he suggests that the great English Condottiere, Sir John Hawkwood, may have introduced it into Florence. But several Italian writers declare that Julius Pollux exactly describes it in a book he dedicated to the Emperor Commodus, and that it has existed in Italy from time immemorial.

The game of calcio played in 1529 in order to flout the enemy, and show how little the Florentines cared for the Prince of Orange, is celebrated. Trumpeters were stationed on the top of the church of Sta. Croce, so that their triumphant blasts might be heard by the besiegers, whose gunners, fortunately for them, were not skilful enough to hit them from Poggio Imperiale.

Tournaments, jousts, ballets on horseback, masquerades and sham battles, often took place on the Piazza Sta. Croce. Here the Duke of Athens was hailed as Lord of Florence by the assembled people, but in the following year for several days he held grand jousts, and the citizens stood sullenly aloof. In 1468, when Lorenzo the Magnificent held the lists against all comers, “great was the concourse of jousters,” writes Niccolò Valori, “the magnificence of the arms and the wealth of jewels were only surpassed by the resplendent surcoats and habits of cloth of gold.” Mounted successively on chargers presented to him by the Duke of Ferrara and the King of Naples, and wearing armour sent to him by the Duke of Milan, Lorenzo de’ Medici won the prize of valour. Luca Pulci thus describes the entry of his friend and patron, and his beautiful banner:—

“E mi parea sentir sonar Miseno

Quando sul campo Lorenzo guignea

Sopra un caval che tremar fe il terreno:

E nel suo bel vesillo si vedea

Di sopra un sole e poi l’arcobalena

Dove a lettere d’oro si leggea

‘LE TEMS REVIENT’ che puo interpretarsi

Tornare il tempo e’ l secol rinnovarsi.”

A little later Poliziano celebrated in glowing lines the tournament held by Giuliano de’ Medici, but La Giostra was never finished, for when Giuliano was assassinated Poliziano laid down his pen.

After the death of the last of the family of dell’Antella the old palace passed to the Biagi, and then to the Della Stufa. It now belongs to Signor Mariani.

PALAZZO ANTINORI
Piazza S. Gaetano. No. 3.

In 1490 Niccolò degl’Antinori bought this palace from the Boni della Catena. It is supposed by some to have been built by Baccio d’Agnolo, whilst others think that Giuliano da San Gallo was the architect on account of some resemblance with Palazzo Gondi.

The origin of the Antinori is as uncertain as that of their palace, but they are probably an offshoot of the powerful family of Buondelmonti. Francesco degl’Antinori was the first of twenty-three Priors of his house in 1351. His eldest great-nephew, Niccolò, bought the Boni palace, while the second, Bernardo, was the founder of another branch of the family whose palace is in Via de’ Serragli. Niccolò was four times elected a Prior, in 1498 he was Captain of Arezzo, three years later he was sent to quell a revolt at Pistoja, and then he was named ambassador at Milan. His sons took opposite sides in politics; the two eldest, ardent republicans, were banished when the Medici returned to Florence in 1513, whilst the third, Alessandro, was created a Senator by the Duke Alessandro. A like honour fell to his son Sebastiano who was selected by Cosimo I. to revise Boccaccio’s writings. Alessandro’s other son Lorenzo was a great traveller, a good musician and an excellent man of business who augmented the family wealth, and his descendants filled many important posts under the Grand Dukes of Tuscany.[19] This fine palace still belongs to the Antinori family.

PALAZZO BARDI
Via de’ Benci. No. 2.

The principal palace of the Bardi family in Via de’ Bardi, where the beautiful Dianora is supposed to have lived (see p. 57), was bought by the family of the Tempi, whose name it still bears and for whom it was entirely altered and modernized by the architect Matteo Nigetti about 1610. Ser Benedetto di Tempo, notary to the Signoria in 1357, was their ancestor, several of the family were created Senators, while two became Cardinals. The Marquess Benedetto Tempi, who died in 1770, was the last of his race, and the palace now belongs to the Marquess Bargagli; so there is no representative of the ancient and powerful family of the Bardi in the Oltrarno. They were lords of the castle of Ruballa near Antella, and took their name from Pagano di Bardo, who made a donation of land to the church of Sta. Reparata of Florence in 1112. About that time the family settled in Florence in the Borgo Pidiglioso and built so many palaces and strong towers that the street was called Via de’ Bardi. Gualterotto de’ Bardi, a canon, joined in the crusade of 1215 and, after fighting at Damietta, became Bishop of Acre. Geri, who bore the standard of the Guelphs at the battle of Montaperti, was exiled with the rest of his party by the victorious Ghibellines, and his nephew Roberto, who wrote the life of Filippo Villani, was Chancellor of the University of Paris for forty years. Another nephew, Cino, fought by Dante’s side in the battle of Campaldino in 1289, but there cannot have been much friendship between them, as Cino’s brother was the husband of Beatrice Portinari. The fortune of their handsome nephew Piero, Lord of Vernio and of Mangona, was so large that even after the failure of the great Bardi-Peruzzi bank he was one of the foremost citizens of Florence, and aroused such jealousy by his riches, valour and remarkable personal beauty, that he was excluded from all offices. Publicly insulted by Jacopo Gabrielli, Captain of the Guard instituted by the oligarchy of the Nobili Popolani to hold the Grandi in check, he plotted with Bardo de’ Frescobaldi, who had also been insulted, to murder the Captain and to “reform” the city. One of his cousins, terrified at the possible consequences, secretly revealed the plot to the Signori, who caused the great bell of the palace to be rung and summoned the people to arms. The Bardi and other nobles fortified their towers, and civil war would have ensued but for the intervention of the Podestà, who promised a full pardon for all offences if the Grandi would lay down their arms. He broke his word, and all the nobles who had taken part in the conspiracy were banished. They only re-entered the city after the Duke of Athens became ruler, and a few years later made themselves so hated that, as Giovanni Villani writes:—

“On the 24th September, 1343, the people rose against the Bardi, Rossi, Frescobaldi, Mannelli and Nerli, Grandi of the Oltrarno, who at once seized and held the bridges. The palace of the sons of Messer Vieri de’ Bardi was strong and the tower well fortified, as was the house of the Mannelli at the head of the Ponte Vecchio, then built of wood. The people could not pass over it, nor could they cross the Ponte Rubaconte (now Ponte alle Grazie), on account of the strength of the palaces of the Bardi of S. Gregorio; so they left a guard under the houses of the Alberti and also at the Ponte Vecchio, and then, with many soldiers on horseback, they went to the Ponte alia Carraja which was guarded by the Nerli. The people of S. Frediano, Cuculia and the Fondaccio, were however so numerous that before the others arrived they had stormed the bridge-head and the houses of the Nerli, who were put to flight. And thus the victorious people passed over the bridge, and joined those of the Oltrarno and furiously attacked the Frescobaldi.... The Bardi seeing themselves bereft of any aid from the Rossi and the Frescobaldi were much alarmed, they nevertheless armed their barricades and fought in such manner that some were killed and many were wounded on either side; for the Bardi were well furnished with both horse and foot and had many mercenaries, so the people tried in vain to force their stockades. Four companies of those of the Oltrarno were then ordered to attack them from behind by the hill of S. Giorgio. The Bardi seeing themselves hotly besieged and assailed on all sides were much afeard, and began to abandon their barricades on the Piazza or Ponte, which were guarded by the tower of the Guelph party and by the palace of the sons of Messer Vieri de’ Bardi, in order to defend themselves against those who were coming from the cane-brakes of S. Giorgio. Then a certain Strozza, a German captain, got inside the barricades of the Piazza a Ponte with his brigade, with great peril to himself on account of the many stones and bricks which were hurled at him. He rushed to Sta. Maria Sopr’Arno, followed by the people, and was there joined by those of this side of the Arno who had crossed the bridge and, surmounting every obstacle on the other side, had joined with the people of the Oltrarno. They broke down the resistance and the power of the Bardi who fled to the Borgo S. Niccolò, imploring their neighbours and the company of the Gonfalone of the Scala, who had already taken possession of the palaces of the Bardi of S. Gregorio, to save their palaces from being sacked and burnt, and their lives from being taken. So the people who were on guard at the head of the bridge near the houses of the Alberti, saved the Bardi from death, but all their houses, from Sta. Lucia as far as the Ponte Vecchio, were robbed of everything by the popolo minuto ... who in their fury, after sacking the houses set them on fire. Twenty-two rich and splendid palaces and houses were burnt and it is estimated that the loss was more than 60,000 golden florins. Thus ended the resistance of the Bardi, in their great pride and power, against the people.”

Piero scornfully rejected the conditions imposed on the Grandi by the People and retired to his estate of Vernio where he died in 1345. His sons Sozzo and Notto were created Imperial Vicarii of the county of Vernio by the Emperor Charles IV., and the diploma was ratified by the Emperor Leopoldo in 1697 in favour of their descendants. It was abrogated by the treaty of Vienna in 1814, when Vernio became an integral portion of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. As long as Florence had been republican none of Piero de’ Bardi’s family entered the city, but under Cosimo I. his grandson Alberto settled there, whose son Pandolfo played the ugly part of confidant between Francesco de’ Medici and Bianci Cappello, whilst another son was the Franciscan friar who performed the first (secret) marriage of the Grand Duke and his mistress only a few days after the death of the Grand Duchess Joan of Austria. Alberto’s brother Camillo took up his residence in a palace in Via de’ Benci, bought by his ancestors from the old family of the Busini in 1482, and here his descendants still live. It is said to have been built by Brunelleschi and has a pretty courtyard surrounded by an arcade. The windows of the second floor are untouched, but the mural paintings (graffite) on the façade, believed to have been the first done in Florence, have been restored. A grandiloquent inscription records that Giovanni Bardi, Count of Vernio, founded in the XVIth century the society whose object was to reform recitative and melody; the first fruits of which were Dafne, with Peri’s music, and Euridice with music by Caccini.

PALAZZO BARTOLINI SALIMBENI
Piazza Sta. Trinita. No. 8.

In 1516 Messer Lorenzo Bartolini, Apostolic Pro-notary, and his brother Giovanni, bought five-eighths of a shop from Girolamo Deti, and a year later several more shops from heirs of other members of the same family. Two years afterwards garrulous old Giovanni Cambi notes in his Diary, “at this time Giovanni Bartolini began a small palace at the corner of Porta Rossa and the Terma, on the Piazza di Sta. Trinita, where was the tavern of the Camel, and painters, shoemakers and a baker. It will be a great ornament to the city, as it is in a good position. Some of the shops belonged to the Soldanieri, who have been for long away from the Florentine dominion, and now will have more reason than ever to remain abroad, as the sale was made without their consent.”

The Bartolini took possession of the property, and their pulchrum edifitium as the notary termed it, was already far advanced when the Venerable Maestro Berdardino d’Oderigo Soldanieri, a Dominican, arrived in Florence after a long absence. He lost no time in attacking Bartolini for having taken unlawful possession of three-eighths of the shop which belonged to his family, and was appeased with difficulty. However finally all was arranged and Lorenzo Bartolini took up his abode in the palace in 1521. Baccio d’Agnolo (Baglioni) was the architect, and Vasari tells us, “this was the first edifice built with square windows having frontispieces, and of which the columns of the door support the architrave, the frieze, and the cornice; therefore the Florentines derided these novelties with jibes and with sonnets, and they hung it about with garlands of boughs as is done in churches for the festivals, saying that it was more like the façade of a church than of a palace; so that Baccio was nigh losing his reason: however knowing that he had followed good examples and that the building was beautiful, he took heart.” I may add that he revenged himself by inscribing over the door, CARPERE PROMPTUS QUAM IMITARI, as a lesson to the people of Florence.

Vasari again mentions this palace in his life of Cronaca, blaming Baccio for having, “in order to imitate Cronaca, placed a huge antique cornice, in fact the frontispiece of Montecavallo, on the top of a small and elegant façade, so that nothing could be worse, and all for lack of knowledge; it looks like a large hat on a small head.” However he admits that “nevertheless the building has always been much praised.” It has also been imitated, for the palace of the Duc de Retz, in the Rue Montmartre in Paris, is copied from it. The origin of the remarkably pretty friezes which surround the house under the first and the second floor windows, of three poppies tied together, and the motto per non dormire, which forms an architectural ornament, is said to have been a trick attempted on Messer Bernuccio di Giovanni Salimbeni of Siena, whose descendants came to Florence and took the name of Bartolini. He was a great silk merchant, and with other friends passed through Florence every year to go to the fair of Sinalunga with his Florentine acquaintances. They determined to steal a march on Messer Bernuccio, and one year mixed poppy juice with the wine served at the banquet, intending to start at daylight and thus obtain the pick of the market. But old Salimbeni was warned, and managed to change the flasks, thus turning the tables on the Florentines to the great advantage of the Sienese. He then invented the device and the motto, with which his descendants ornamented their palace.

PALAZZO BARTOLINI SALIMBENI. PALAZZO BUONDELMONTI. CORNER OF PALAZZO SPINI.

In 1868 the palace was sold to Prince Ercole Pio di Savoia; whose daughters still own it, and many readers will doubtless remember it as the old Hôtel du Nord. Inside is a very pretty loggia and the rooms are well-proportioned. It is sad to see one of the most exquisite buildings in Florence falling to ruin.

Opposite the palace, on the Piazza di Sta. Trinita, stands the column described by Evelyn in his Diary as being “of ophite, upon which is a statue of Justice, with her balance and sword, out of porphyry, and the more remarkable for being the first which had been carved out of that hard material, and brought to perfection, after the art had been utterly lost; they say this was done by hardening the tools in the juice of certain herbs. This statue was erected on that spot, because there Cosimo was first saluted with the news of Siena being taken.... Looking at the Justice, in copper, we are told that the Duke, asking a gentleman how he liked the piece, he answered, that he liked it very well, but that it stood too high for poor men to come at.”

PALAZZO BARTOLOMMEI
Via Lambertesca. No. 11.

The old palace of the Lamberteschi, with which the tower of the ancient family of the Gherardini had been incorporated, was bought in 1640 by Anton Maria Bartolommei, and to it was added, according to an entry in the catasto, “in 1824 a building, called the tower of the Girolami, at the corner of Via Lambertesca and Via Por Santa Maria, bought by the Marquess Girolamo Bartolommei from the heirs of Count Covoni, whose wife was the last of the Girolami. According to tradition the progenitor of the Bartolommei was Marcovaldo, who came into Italy with the Emperor Frederick I., and was created Marquess of Ancona and Count of Romagna. His descendant Sigismondo was Captain of War in Perugia in 1358; beaten by the Pontifical troops, he fled to Florence, where his son Bartolommeo obtained the citizenship and gave his name to the family. His son Girolamo was implicated in the conspiracy against the Medici with Orazio Pucci and Zanobi Girolami, and sentenced to death in contumaciam; another son fled to Lyons, where he made a large fortune in trade, which eventually came back to the family. Thus Anton Maria was enabled to buy the palace and restore the adjoining church of S. Stefano. Girolamo de’ Bartolommei, a poet of the XVIIth century, was Consul of the Florentine Academy in 1648, and published two volumes of tragedies, but his best known work is America, a poem written in honour of Amerigo Vespucci. Mattia, created Marquess of Montegiove by Fernando II., was ambassador at Paris under Cosimo III., and from his son descended the late Marquess Ferdinando Bartolommei, last of the family, who was one of the factors of United Italy.[20]

The Gherardini, whose old tower was incorporated in the Lamberteschi palace, were Guelphs; many of them fought at Montaperti, while eight signed the peace of the Cardinal Latino in 1280. Andrea Gherardini, one of the leaders of the White Party, was exiled together with Dante, and his brother Lotteringo was killed in a street skirmish by adherents of Corso Donato. They were a fighting race; five of them fell at the battle of Montecatini in 1315, and the two last scions of the family died in battle, one in the Seven Years War in Germany, the other in Flanders. Passerini affirms that a Gherardini went to Ireland in the XIIIth century, and was the progenitor of the great family of the Fitzgeralds.[21]

TOWERS OF THE GIROLAMI AND OF THE GHERARDINI.

The Girolami whose tower adjoins that of the Gherardini claimed S. Zenobius, Bishop of Florence in the VIth century, as belonging to their family, and on the 25th May his statue in a niche in the tower used to be decorated with garlands of flowers, with great ceremony and much blowing of trumpets. The family possessed the ring of the saint, held in such estimation as a wonder-working relic that Lorenzo the Magnificent sent it in 1482 to Paris to Louis XI. The king was cured of a severe illness after touching it, and sent it back in a jewelled box of great value which the Gherardini sold, and founded a rich canonry in Sta. Maria del Fiore with the proceeds. In 1523 Raffaello de’ Girolami was Gonfalonier of Justice, and five years later Commissary of War. Condemned to death after the capitulation of Florence, the sentence was commuted at the request of Don Ferrante Gonzaga to imprisonment for life in the fortress of Pisa, where he was poisoned by order of Pope Clement VII., as soon as the Imperialists left Tuscany. One of his sons fought as a lad against Cosimo I. at Siena under Strozzi, and was sentenced to lose his head, but escaped to France. Another obtained permission to return to Florence after long years of exile, and as all his estates had been confiscated, left nothing to his son save the family hatred of the Medici. He joined Orazio Pucci and Girolamo Bartolommei in conspiring against the Grand Duke, and was condemned to death in contumaciam. Raffaello de’ Girolami founded the Academy of the Sapienza in Rome, and became a Cardinal in 1743, and the last of the family died about forty years later, appointing the sons of his sister, married to Count Covoni, his heirs.

PALAZZO BORGHESE
Via Ghibellina. No. 110.

This palace is chiefly interesting because part of it (corner of Via de’ Giraldi and Via de’ Pandolfini) was built where once stood the house of Giovanni and Matteo Villani. The Salviati bought it with some others, and Silvani erected for them a large palace, which afterwards became the property of Prince Camillo Borghese. He purchased many adjoining houses, and enlarged it in 1823, when he must have spent a fortune on the magnificent internal decorations. It now belongs to the Borghese Club.

The family of the Villani came from Borgo S. Lorenzo in the XIIIth century, and took their name from Villano, son of Stoldo. Giovanni, the famous chronicler, was the eldest son of Villano, and superintended the building of the campanile of the Badia of Florence and of the doors of S. Giovanni. He was also Master of the Mint, and sat several times as Prior in the Palazzo de’ Signori. In 1325 he fought at Altopascio, and soon afterwards was imprisoned for debt as a partner of the Buonaccorsi, whose bank was ruined by the failure of the Bardi. His delightful Cronica, picturesque, pure and elegant in style, and wonderfully impartial, has been a mine of wealth to all students of the history of old Florence. It was continued, after he died of the plague in 1348, by his brother Matteo, until he fell a victim to the same malady in 1363. Matteo’s eldest son Filippo added forty-two chapters to the chronicle, but of very inferior interest, bringing it down to 1365. He was also the author of a commentary on Dante, and of Philippi solitarii de origine civitatis Florentiæ, et ejusdem famosis civibus, which remained in manuscript until 1747, when the second part, containing the lives of various famous persons, was published. He died in 1404, and the last descendant of his brother Giovanni in 1617.

PALAZZO BOUTURLIN
Via de’ Servi. No. 15.

Bastiano, son of Zanobi Ciaini, also called Montaguto or Montauto, from his castle at Santa Maria a Montauto, made a large fortune in trade. In 1540 he bought several houses in the Via de’ Servi, and summoned Domenico, son of Baccio d’Agnolo (Baglioni), who Vasari declares to have been an architect of no common merit, “besides carving most excellently in wood,” to build him a palace. A brother inherited it, who must have had losses as in 1572 the house was let to Messer Raffaello de’ Medici, a knight of San Stefano, and four years later was sold to Messer Giovanni Niccolini, who after his wife’s death was created a Cardinal through the influence of the Medici.

Giovanni added to the palace, filled it with costly works of art, and fitted up one room for his fine collection of coins. Beneath the architraves of two doors on the ground floor, under the loggia, is still to be seen his name, IOANNES NICOLINUS AUG. CARD. F. As Giovanni Dosio was the architect employed by him to build the fine Niccolini chapel in Santa Croce, it is probable that he also made the additions to the palace. Filippo, his son, again enlarged it, and inscribed the date, A.D. MDCLV. on the central arch of the gallery above the loggia. About the same time the Grand Duke created him Marquess of Ponsacco and Camugliano, with remainder to collateral relations in case he had no children. In 1666 Lorenzo, a descendant of his great-uncle, inherited the palace, and added to it, as is shown by the inscription above a door in the courtyard, LAUREN. NICOLINI. PONTIS. SACCI. MARCHIO. He bought some small houses and adjoining land to make a garden, and tied up the palace and its contents upon his heirs male. But his son Filippo left it to his sons in common, and they sold the old family palace in 1824 to Count Demetrio Bouturlin, Privy Councillor and Chamberlain to the Emperor of Russia, whose descendants still own it. In 1854 the façade was plastered from the first floor upwards, and decorated in graffite, and with paintings. During the few years that Florence was the capital of Italy, Palazzo Bouturlin was the residence of the British ambassador, Sir Henry Elliot.

PALAZZO BUONDELMONTI
Piazza Sta. Trinita

Ancestor of the great and powerful family of the Buondelmonti was Sichelmo, who lived about 905, and whose son Azzo, Lord of Petrojo, was the grandfather of Giovanni, founder of the Vallombrosan Order. His other son, Rinieri Pagano, ruled the whole Val di Pesa and from him descended Uguccione and Rosso, whose feudal castle of Montebuoni was taken and razed to the ground by order of the Commune of Florence in 1135 at the instigation, it is said, of the Uberti who were jealous of their power. Half in derision, half in fear, they were called the Buoni del Monte (Good men of the Mountain) by travellers who dreaded being waylaid. Uguccione and Rosso were forced to come and live in Florence, and from Buondelmonte, son of Uguccione, the family took their name, while Rosso’s son Scolajo, founded the family of the Scolari.

Buondelmonte’s three sons, all hard fighters, were made knights of the Golden Spur, and it was the murder of his grandson and namesake by the Amidei, that plunged Florence into civil war in 1215.

Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti was among the young men invited by Messer Mazzingo Mazzinghi to a banquet at his castle near Campi, to celebrate his receiving the honour of knighthood. During dinner the buffoon of the house snatched a plate from before Uberto Infangati, a friend of Buondelmonte, who curtly reproved the jester’s insolence. Oddo Fifanti defended the man, and losing his temper, took the plate from him and hurled it at Infangati. Young Buondelmonte then rose from the table and attacked Fifanti with his dagger. Friends made peace between them and a marriage was arranged between Buondelmonte and a daughter of Lambertuccio Amidei and of Fifanti’s sister. A few days before the wedding the bridegroom rode under the windows of the Donati palace and Forese Donati’s wife, Madonna Gualdrada, called to him and bade him come up. She laughed him to scorn for a coward, who out of fear of the Uberti and the Fifanti was going to marry an ugly girl. “All the more do I grieve,” she added, “because I had intended your old playmate, my daughter, to be your bride.” Saying this she led him into the next room where her daughter “the most beautiful maiden in Florence,” writes Villani, sat singing. Buondelmonte, as the old saying is, “lost his intellect through his eyes,” and forgetting his plighted word asked for her hand. The wedding was fixed for the 10th February, the very day he was to have married the daughter of Lambertuccio Amidei. Furious at the insult offered to their house, the Amidei summoned their relations to meet in the church of S. Stefano, and Schiatta degl’Uberti proposed to slice the fair face of young Buondelmonte and spoil his beauty. But Mosca Lamberti replied in the well-known words: “Before thou beatest or woundest, dig thine own grave. Give him what he deserves. A thing finished is done with.” And so his death was determined.

On Easter morn 1315 the handsome young bridegroom, clothed in white with a garland of flowers on his head, was riding over the Ponte Vecchio on his favourite white palfrey. As he debouched into Por Sta. Maria the great doors of the Amidei palace flew open, and the murderers, led by Schiatta degl’Uberti who gave the first blow and knocked Buondelmonte off his horse, killed him near the old statue of Mars at the corner of the bridge. Well may Dante exclaim:

“O Buondelmonti! what ill counselling

Prevail’d on thee to break the plighted bond?

Many, who now are weeping, would rejoice,

Had God to Ema given thee, the first time

Thou near our city camest. But so was doom’d:

Florence! on that maimed stone which guards the bridge,

The victim, when thy peace departed, fell.”

Par. Canto xvi., Cary’s trans.

“This day witnessed the beginning of the destruction of Florence,” writes an old chronicler. The beautiful young bride, seated on the funeral car with her dead husband’s head in her lap, went through the streets calling for vengeance on his murderers. The city was divided into two factions and Guelphs and Ghibellines flew at each other’s throats. After some years of incessant strife another marriage was arranged. This time it was the daughter of a Buondelmonti who wedded an Uberti. But at a banquet in the same old castle of the Mazzinghi at Campi, a quarrel arose in which Schiatta degl’Uberti was killed, while Oddo Fifanti had his nose cut off and his mouth slit from ear to ear. Neri degl’Uberti thereupon sent back his wife to her father saying he would not beget children from the daughter of a race of traitors.

The Buondelmonti were all handsome, which probably accounts for the love stories connected with their name. Not many years passed ere all Florence was keenly interested in the fate of Ippolito Buondelmonti, the hero of a manuscript Latin tale and of a ballad printed in the XVIth century. In the Osservatore Fiorentino the story is told as follows. “Ippolito Buondelmonti, one of the handsomest and most polite youths of Florence, saw the young daughter of Amerigo de’ Bardi at the feast of S. Giovanni, and was seized with such love for the maiden that her grace and beauty were ever present to him. When he heard who she was, in despite of the bitter hatred between the two houses, he studied in what way he could please her, passing often under her windows and following her when she went out. Then reflecting on the great difficulties arising from the enmity of their parents, he was the most sorrowful man in the world. At length consumed by continual grief he became so ill that he lay in bed and no doctor could discover his malady. His mother, who loved him tenderly, implored him to say what was the cause of his thus wasting away, and after long resistance he confessed his love for Dianora de’ Bardi. She, who cared for nought save to restore her son to life, went to an old friend, Madonna Contessina, a cousin of the Bardi, who lived in a villa at Montecelli half a mile from the city, and entreated her so earnestly that at last Contessina promised to help her.

“It being September a solemn feast was to be celebrated in that district, and Dianora was invited with many other girls, her friends and relations. After a joyous midday meal the girls went to repose in various rooms, and Dianora was led into one where Ippolito had been hid since the day before. The maiden was much alarmed but he, with submissive and gentle manner, said he would rather die than cause her any fear, and offered her his dagger to pierce his heart. The end was that she promised to accept him as her lord on the condition that everything was to be kept secret from her parents. It was arranged between them that the next night she would let down a cord from her window to which he was to attach a silken ladder, and so they parted. At midnight Ippolito stole cautiously across the Ponte Vecchio with the ladder hid in his cap, but as he reached Amerigo’s palace in Via de’ Bardi, the Bargello, or head of the police, with his guard, came down the street from S. Niccolò. Ippolito fled up the Costa, losing his cap as he ran. As ill-luck would have it another patrol was coming down from the Porta S. Giorgio and he was seized and taken to the Palazzo del Podestà. To shield Dianora he declared that he had intended first to rob and then set fire to the palace of the enemy of his house. The Podestà refused to believe him and sent for his father, before whom he repeated his words, and the next morning the banner of Justice on the old palace and the tolling of the great bell, announced that a culprit had been condemned to death. Ippolito obtained as a last favour to be led to execution past the palace of the Bardi, whose pardon he declared he wished to ask, but really in hopes of gazing once more on the face of his love. Dianora saw him from her window, and casting aside all maidenly modesty rushed down into the street exclaiming: “He is my affianced husband and only risked his life out of his great love for me.” The procession was stopped and word was sent to the Podestà, who stayed the execution and summoned the lovers and their families before him. There Dianora pleaded for the life of her lover and for her own love so successfully, that not only was the marriage allowed, but the Bardi and the Buondelmonti swore friendship. The whole city rejoiced and Ippolito and Dianora lived most happily for many years and were the parents of many children.”

In June 1378, when the Arti, or Guilds, rose against the nobles, and to the cry of Viva il Popolo sacked and burnt many of the old towers and palaces, those of the Buondelmonti, which extended from the Piazza Sta. Trinita some way down the Borgo S.S. Apostoli, were destroyed. The façade of the present palace, which must have been far more imposing before the great loggia at the top was bricked up and divided into many rooms, was frescoed by Jacone early in the XVIth century, with subjects from the life of Pippo Spano,[22] but all traces of his work have perished. The name of Buondelmonti occurs frequently in the annals of Florence among her soldiers and her ambassadors, while Esau, son of Manente who married a sister of the Grand Seneschal Acciaiuoli (see p. 2) and followed his brother-in-law to Naples where he was made Lord High Chamberlain, attained the dignity of King of Rumenia and Despot of Arta, but died childless.

Zanobi Buondelmonti was implicated in the plot to assassinate the Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, and on hearing of the arrest of Alamanni, one of the conspirators, he hurried home to conceal himself in one of those secret hiding places which existed in all large houses. But his wife, with courage “more worthy of a man than of a woman,” writes Nardi, drove him almost by force out of the house, gave him all the money she could gather together, and told him to make haste and cross the frontier. As he left the city he met the Cardinal returning from his afternoon drive, and barely escaped being seen by dashing into the shop of a sculptor. He reached the frontier in safety and went to his friend Ludovico Ariosto, then Podestà of Castelnuovo in the Ferrara territory, who had always been Buondelmonti’s guest when he came to Florence. Varchi says that he was also an intimate friend of Machiavelli “whose virtues he acquired without being tainted by any of his vices.” He was eventually pardoned, and died with his whole family of the plague at Barga, where he was Commissary. Andrea, one of the few of the family who entered the Church, was Archbishop of Florence. The family came to an end in 1774 when the Senator Francesco Giovacchino de’ Buondelmonti died, and the palace is now the property of Signor Adami.

PALAZZO DEL BUONTALENTI
(CASINO DI SAN MARCO) Via Cavour. No. 63.

Ottaviano de’ Medici, whose house adjoined the Orti Medicei, bought, in order to obtain an exit into Via San Gallo, a house, courtyard and loggia, from the Compagnia dei Tessitori di Drappi, an offset of the Guild of Silk. The beautiful loggia in Via San Gallo, which Signor Iodico del Badia attributes to Giuliano da San Gallo, was walled up, but has recently been opened and well restored.[23] Ottaviano was held in such high esteem by the Medici family that Clement VII. made him administrator of all their property in Tuscany, and guardian of the young Duchess Caterina, the orphan daughter of Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino, who afterwards became Queen of France. When Ippolito and Alessandro de’ Medici were forced to fly the city in 1527, Ottaviano took up his abode in the great Medici palace, in order to protect it from being looted. With the accession of Alessandro his duties ceased as far as the palace and the villas were concerned, but it was only when Cosimo I. ascended the throne that he was called upon to hand over the vast territorial possessions. He was found to be a debtor of 5,106 ducats, and in payment of this sum he ceded to the Duke his house adjoining the Orti Medicei.

When Francesco I. succeeded his father he commissioned Bernardo Buontalenti to build him a palace in the Orti, where he had a chemical laboratory and a furnace for smelting different metals in the hopes of discovering how to make gold, and part of Ottaviano’s house was incorporated with it. The Grand Duke left the palace to Don Antonio, his supposed son by Bianca Cappello, and Ferdinando I. confirmed the donation on the condition that he never married. Don Antonio embellished the interior, and made a beautiful garden, which he decorated with marble and bronze statues. He took a great interest in printing and had a private press, and continued the chemical experiments of the Grand Duke Francesco. Galileo was a friend of his, and Count Pier Filippo Covoni, to whose pamphlets we are indebted for the account of this palace, cites several of the Prince’s letters to him.[24] After his death the Casino passed to the Cardinal Carlo de’ Medici, who employed Matteo Rosselli and other artists to fresco some of the rooms which he filled with pictures. These were distributed among the various galleries of Florence by his heir, Cosimo III.; the statues and busts were sent to the gardens of Boboli, Petraja and Castello, and the fine cabinets and tapestries were removed to the Pitti palace. For many years the house remained empty; then it was used as barracks for the bodyguard of the Grand Duke, and in 1846 it became the custom house. During the few years that Florence was the capital of United Italy, the Foreign Office was installed in the Casino, which then assumed the more serious name of Palazzo del Buontalenti. It now is the seat of the Court of Appeal, and of the Assize Court.

PALAZZO CANACCI
Piazza S. Biagio. No. 3.

The Canacci came originally from S. Stefano ad Ugnano, and took their name from a certain Lapo surnamed Canaccio. That they were rich is proved by their fine old palace, which has just been restored. Ser Giovanni was notary to the Republic in 1422, but the name of Canacci would have remained comparatively unknown if the Duke Jacopo Salviati had not fallen in love with the beautiful wife of Giustino. I cannot do better than tell the sad tale in the words of an anonymous writer of the time, whose manuscript is in the Marucelliana library in Florence.

“There was in Florence a gentleman of the old and honourable family of the Canacci, named Giustino, well known to me and to others still alive. He was considered a man of but little sense, because having several grown-up children by a former wife, and being near seventy years of age, he took to himself a second wife, Caterina, inferior to himself in rank, but endowed with marvellous beauty. Now Giustino was the ugliest, most tiresome, and the dirtiest man in Florence, which encouraged many to solicit the good graces of Caterina, who apparently led a modest life until they say she listened to Lorenzo Serzelli and Vincenzio Carlini. There were also two youths, friends of Jacopo Salviati, Duke of Giuliano, the greatest personage for birth, enormous wealth and other admirable qualities, in the city of Florence (always excepting the princes of the ruling house), who a few years before had taken to wife Donna Veronica, daughter to Don Carlo Cybo, Prince of Massa and Carrara. This lady had not much beauty, but such pride and conceit that the Duke was driven to seek for comfort elsewhere.... It was rumoured that the Duchess entered S. Pier Maggiore one morning, and as though by chance placed herself by the side of Caterina. In a few words she bade her never again speak to her husband, and Caterina replied, perchance with more arrogance and spirit than became her condition, thus increasing the ire of the Duchess and ensuring her own ruin. The Duke’s love grew every day, and the Duchess determined to cut the thread. Rumour has it that she tried to poison Caterina, but failed, and determined to take vengeance in another way. She sent for the brothers Bartolomeo and Francesco Canacci, youths of about twenty-four or so, who, though they did not inhabit, yet frequented their father’s house. After representing to them that Caterina’s licentious life brought ignominy on themselves and their posterity, and that as persons of birth and consideration it behoved them to free themselves of her presence, she promised to give them every help if they would do this, and to protect them from any future peril.... The Duchess hired four assassins from Massa, who entered the city one by one to avoid suspicion, and were kept by her until the time was ripe for effecting her abominable project. On the night of 31st December, 1638, Bartolomeo Canacci, accompanied by the aforesaid bandits, who stood at the opposite side of the street in the shade, knocked at his step-mother’s door. Her maid looked out of the window and asked who was there, and on his answering friends, recognized his voice, and drew the cord of the latch. Bartolomeo and the assassins rushed upstairs with such fury that Serzelli and Carlini, who were sitting with Caterina, suspected some evil thing and, springing to their feet, fled by another staircase on to the roof, whence they got into a neighbouring house. Caterina was then murdered by these infamous executors of the barbarous cruelty of the Duchess, together with her maid, probably to prevent her giving evidence. After this the bodies of these two most unfortunate women were cut to pieces, and carried into a carriage. Parts of the bodies were thrown into a well, others into the Arno, where they were found the next day, but the head of Caterina was taken to the Duchess.... On Sundays and holidays she used to send to the Duke’s room a silver basin covered by a fair cloth, containing collars, cuffs and such like things. But on this first of January the present was of a different kind. Taking the head of poor Caterina, which still preserved the beauty which had been the cause of her death, Donna Veronica placed it in the basin, covered it with the usual cloth, and sent it by her waiting-woman, who knew naught of the business, into the Duke’s room. When he rose and lifted the cloth to take his clean linen, let his horror be imagined at seeing so pitiful a sight. Knowing full well that his wife had done this deed, he would have no more of her, and they say he never was seen to smile again.” The account then describes how Bartolomeo Canacci was beheaded, while the real assassin, the Duchess, went unpunished, and ends with the reflection, “Whoso foregathers with great people is the last at the table and the first at the gallows.”

The last of the Canacci family died in 1777, and the palace now belongs to the Commune of Florence.

PALAZZO CANIGIANI
Via de’ Bardi. Nos. 22, 24.

This palace consists of two separate houses; the one adjoining the church of Sta. Lucia was a hospice for pilgrims in 1283, and tradition says that S. Francis of Assisi and S. Dominick met here; history, however, affirms that the saints were never together in Florence. More interesting is the connection of both church and palace with Dante, who is said to have often dined with the brethren of the Ospizio de’ Pelegrini after hearing mass in Sta. Lucia on Sundays and holidays. The other palace, with a most picturesque staircase and a fine well-head, belonged to a branch of the Bardi family who assumed the name of Ilarione, or Larione. They became bankrupt, and it was sold to Giovanni Canigiani in 1465; and here the mother of Petrarch, Eletta Canigiani, is said to have been born. The hospice had degenerated into two small houses, which also belonged to the Larione, and were sold at the same time to another of the Canigiani. They were afterwards rebuilt and made into one house.

COURTYARD OF PALAZZO CANIGIANI.

The tradition is that the Canigiani left Fiesole when the town was destroyed, and settled in Florence, where they became one of the great Guelph families; their ancient houses, towers and loggia, were in the Via de’ Bardi, near the Ponte Vecchio. After the defeat of their party at Montaperti in 1260, they took refuge in Lucca, until the Guelphs regained their supremacy in Florence, when twelve of the family became Gonfaloniers of Justice, and fifty-five were Priors. Messer Piero Canigiani is mentioned in the Decameron as being Chancellor to the Empress of Constantinople, and on his return to Italy he filled many important posts. With the exception of Bernardo, who joined Filippo Strozzi and was hanged, the Canigiani were devoted adherents of the Medici. Cosimo I. created a cousin and namesake of Bernardo’s, one of the founders of the Academia della Crusca, a Senator, and Alessandro Canigiani was made Archbishop of Aix through the influence of Queen Catherine de’ Medici. The family became extinct in 1813, when the Giugni succeeded to the name and estates, and to the fine palaces.

On the wall opposite to the Canigiani palace is an inscription recording the landslip in Via de’ Bardi, in which Bernardo Buontalenti nearly lost his life. Twice before the hill had slipped, in 1284 and in 1490, overwhelming the houses built on the slope of the hill of S. Giorgio. In a manuscript in the Magliabecchiana library is an account of what happened on the 12th November, 1547, written probably by one of the Nasi family; perhaps by Lorenzo Nasi, for whom Raphael painted the Madonna del Cardellino, now in the Uffizi. The picture is said to have been dug out from under the ruins of his house.

“I will tell how my house fell, and how we were saved. I rose early as is my wont, and went into my study. Many years before I had noticed that the house had somewhat suffered on the side against the hill, but never did I imagine that there was any danger of its falling. A man from Campiglio was staying with me, and being ill with fever he could not sleep. All night long he heard ceilings cracking and bits of mortar falling, so he rose at daybreak, and seeing certain fissures in the walls, dressed as well as he could and came to warn me. I, believing that these were old cracks, paid small attention to him, and continued my writing. But he being alarmed, left the house. Soon afterwards I heard a great noise, and felt the house tremble, and I left my room to find out the cause of the noise, when my people told me that a large stone pilaster at the foot of the stairs was broken, which alarmed me. Whilst I was thinking what was to be done, and whether we ought to leave the house, I felt a very great shaking, and saw cracks opening in the window-sills, doorways and walls. So with great fear I thought only of saving our lives, and began to shout aloud that every one was to fly with me. Seizing one child in my arms, taking another by the hand, and giving others to my people, shouting and calling I ran to the stairs. Some had already given way, and mortar was falling on all sides. In yet greater terror I rushed down the stairs and out of the house, and took refuge in Sta. Lucia. By my side and behind me ran others, and the last one to come was my wife. I being on the steps of Sta. Lucia, and she still in the street, I caught her by the arm and helped her to mount the steps of the church. Hardly was she safe inside when our house fell all at once with such impetus against the façade of the Canigiani palace and of Sta. Lucia, that I thought the church and all the houses by the river would have been knocked down. No bit of wall higher than one foot remained standing; the vaults gave way, and the houses were ruined to their foundations. Two horses were buried under our house, and all our clothes, linen, and furniture, of every description. It was only by the especial grace of God that of the seventeen persons in our house none were lost. Had we lingered long enough to say a credo, or had Sta. Lucia been shut, we should all have been killed.”

Only three persons lost their lives in this catastrophe, a fourth, a boy of eleven, was saved by a beam falling against the wall, under which he remained unhurt. Baldinucci tells us that “while the child was crying for help under the ruins, and people were throwing bread and other food down an aperture, in order to keep him alive while they tried to remove a huge mass of stones, bricks and wood, a servant of the Duke Cosimo passed by. Horrified at what he saw, he went to the palace immediately and told his master. The Duke ordered that every effort should be made to liberate the wretched boy, and when he was free he took him into his palace, and ever after protected and aided him.” The boy grew up, and became that excellent and universal genius Bernardo Buontalenti.

PALAZZO CAPPONI (NOW FARINOLA)
Via Gino Capponi. No. 29.

Many were the palaces owned by the Capponi family in Florence, now only two bear their name. One in the Via de’ Bardi belonging to the Counts Capponi (see p. 71), and this, built by Fontana in 1705 for the Marquess Alessandro Capponi, the largest private palace in the city, with a handsome staircase and a fine garden. Here in 1876 died the Marquess Gino Capponi, one of the makers of United Italy, last of his branch of the family, regretted by his fellow-citizens, who had a great admiration for his noble character. His Storia della Republica di Firenze has a world-wide reputation. The palace now belongs to his daughter, Marchioness Farinola.

The Capponi family is said to have come from Lucca about 1216, and gave no less than ten Gonfaloniers and fifty-six Priors to the city of their adoption, in whose history they played an important part. With Gino Capponi, born in 1364, began a series of remarkable men. Sent by the Republic of Florence in 1405 to take possession of the citadel of Pisa, and of her two outlying fortresses, he accomplished his task, and left a garrison of hired troops in the citadel. Soon after his departure the Pisans rose and retook the citadel, to the great dismay of the Florentines, who had paid a goodly sum to Visconti and his French ally for the possession of the prize they had long coveted. When Pisa appealed to Florence, as a sister Republic, to return the two fortresses, promising to make good all expenses, Gino remarks in his Commentary, “With these and like phrases they talked in such a disgusting manner that every man in Florence determined he would go naked rather than not conquer Pisa.”[25] In March the following year he and Maso degl’Albizzi were appointed Commissaries of the army before Pisa, and the famine-stricken city surrendered in October, when Gino Capponi was named governor. He died in 1451, leaving three sons; Agostino, from whom descend the branch of the Counts Capponi in Via de’ Bardi; Lorenzo, whose son of the same name established himself in trade at Lyons, and for his charity and munificence during the famine of 1573 was called the father of the poor; and the more famous Neri. He and Cosimo de’ Medici were the two most powerful men in Florence. “Neri was the wisest; the other, Cosimo, was the richest,” writes Cavalcanti. Riches proved to be of more avail, as Neri’s friend and fellow-soldier, Baldaccio d’Anghiari, was murdered, probably with the connivance of Cosimo; and his opposition some years later to the Florentine, or rather Medicean, policy in Lombardy was useless. His son Piero made a large fortune as a merchant when quite a young man, and though his family had always belonged to the popular party as opposed to the Medici, Lorenzo the Magnificent entrusted him with many political missions. In 1494 he sent him as Commissary of the Republic to the camp of Alfonso of Aragon, who was fighting against the Pope and the Venetians; the Neapolitan army was in full retreat when the civilian Capponi placed himself at the head of the troops, rallied them, and led them to victory. The merchant and the diplomatist showed that he was a born leader, and when Piero de’ Medici was driven out of Florence, he was the man to whom her citizens turned. His proud answer to Charles VII. of France is a matter of history. The King, holding his ultimatum in his hand, declared that if it was not accepted he would order his trumpets to sound; whereupon Piero Capponi started forward, and seizing the paper tore it from top to bottom, exclaiming, “If you sound your trumpets we will ring our bells.” Those present were aghast, but Capponi knew Charles wanted money; moreover, Nardi tells us the French were alarmed, as some days before they had seen what a crowd of resolute, well-armed men, the ringing of a bell had brought forth. So the King turned off his threat with a bad joke on Capponi’s name. When Piero Capponi was killed at the head of his men during the siege of the little village of Sojana, Guicciardini says that many of the Florentines, whom he had served so well, openly rejoiced because he was regarded as the head of the party opposed to Savonarola.

His son Niccolò was chief of the Ottimati party, and Baccio Valori advised the Cardinal Passerini, who governed the city for Clement VII., to arrest him, but he was afraid. After the flight of the Cardinal with his two wards, Ippolito and Alessandro de’ Medici, Niccolò Capponi made a long speech in the Great Council, but his prudent advice, a reconciliation with Clement VII. through the intervention of the Emperor Charles V., which implied the restoration of the Medici as citizens of paramount authority, but not as absolute rulers, was not taken. In 1527 he was elected Gonfalonier of Justice, and according to Varchi, the citizens were soon divided into several parties. The Ottomati, or richer nobility who followed Capponi, the Popolani, or popular party, some of whom were called Adirati, being decidedly adverse to Capponi, and the more violent section of the latter, the Arrabiati, who advocated the destruction, root and branch, of the Medici and of their adherents. Niccolò had a difficult part to play and his extraordinary proposal, after reciting nearly word for word a sermon of Savonarola’s in the Great Council, to proclaim Jesus Christ King of Florence was probably, as Varchi suggests, a move to gain the support of the Frateschi, a party of considerable consequence. In spite of many intrigues he was re-elected Gonfalonier of Justice the following year, “when it appearing to many, and with reason,” writes Varchi, “that the authority of the Ten was too great, and therefore dangerous, fifteen citizens of the greater and five of the lesser Guilds were added to the Great Council.” They were called the Arroti alla Pratica de’ Dieci, and sat for six months. Hearing that the Gonfalonier, through Jacopo Salviati, corresponded with the Pope, a law was enacted, in spite of his protestations that what he did was for the good of the Republic, that no one, for good or for evil, should communicate with the Pope. Capponi tendered his resignation, which was not accepted, and he secretly continued his correspondence with Rome, which nearly cost him his life. One day in the Council Chamber he dropped a letter from a friend of Salviati, which was found by a Popolano, a violent antagonist of his, and in a few hours the city was in an uproar. He was deposed and imprisoned, and Carducci, an Arrabiato and his personal enemy, named in his stead. At the end of three days’ imprisonment Niccolò Capponi was brought before the magistrates, and Varchi describes how he entered the Council Chamber, “with a black cloak, and his hood thrown back on his shoulders for greater deference, showing on his usually placid countenance signs rather of anger than of fear.” His long speech to “the Magnificent Gonfalonier, the noble Signori, the most honoured magistrates and citizens, my judges,” is an able piece of special pleading, neither admitting nor denying his guilt. Varchi declares that the letter, which contained nothing of very great importance, was not lost by Capponi at all, but that Francesco Valori dropped it by order of the Pope, who was tired of Niccolò’s beating about the bush, and wanted to sow discord in the city, hoping once more to obtain the sovereignty for his family. Anyhow Capponi was acquitted and must have recovered some of his old popularity, as in the late autumn he formed part of a deputation to the Emperor at Genoa to try and soften his heart towards Florence. Charles was civil, but obdurate; Florence must be reconciled to the Pope, and open her gates to the Medici. On his way home Capponi met Michelangelo, who was going to study the fortifications of Ferrara, who told him what a desperate state Florence was in. Already ill and over-strained, Niccolò Capponi lay down and died, as the old chroniclers tell us, of grief and despair, in the small village of Castelnuovo, in the Garfagnana. His nephew Luigi was the husband of the beautiful Luisa Strozzi who was poisoned probably by the orders of the Duke Alessandro de’ Medici.

Piero Capponi’s palace in Florence was on the Lung’Arno Guicciardini.

PALAZZO CAPPONI (DELLE ROVINATE)
Via de’ Bardi. No. 28.

In former times the Arno flowed at the foot of this palace, but a large part of it was cut off to make the Lung’Arno Torrigiani in 1866. It was built for that wise and honest citizen Niccolò Da Uzzano by Lorenzo de’ Bicci, and some traces of the ancient architecture can be traced here and there in the interior. The Da Uzzano were men of note in the time of the Emperor Henry VII., and for the part they took in the defence of Florence were placed under the ban of the Empire. Niccolò Da Uzzano, born about 1359, was thrice Gonfalonier of Justice; as an ardent lover of liberty he opposed, but without success, the election of Giovanni de’ Medici to this office and while he lived held the balance of power between Rinaldo degl’Albizzi and Giovanni’s son, Cosimo the Elder. His famous speech to Niccolò Barbadori, given by Machiavelli in his Storia di Firenze, is that of a far-seeing statesman, and shows that the Florentines were right in saying that his death was a public calamity. His only daughter married a Capponi and the palace belongs to their descendant Count Luigi Capponi. The surname of “delle Rovinate,” or the ruined, by which this branch of the family is known, arose from the landslip nearly opposite the palace (see p. 68). The church of Sta. Lucia close by bears the same appellation.

PALAZZO CERCHI
Via Condotta

Before the building of the Palazzo de’ Signori in 1292 the Priors met in the Cerchi palace in Via del Garbo, now divided into many houses. Only vestiges of their towers, and of their once famous loggia, can still be traced at the corner of Via de’ Cerchi and Via de’ Cimatori. Piero Monaldi writes in his manuscript history of the ancient family of the Cerchi that they came from Acone, “of which place they were lords and also of Ripozzano. In Florence they owned towers, a loggia and sumptuous palaces, which were destroyed during the civil strife and discord. A noble race they were, rich and powerful in the city, with many retainers, munificent and lordly in the country side. But fate, enemy of their felicity, divided their house in the time of Pope Boniface VIII. Some became heads of the White party whilst others remained of the Black, so that they were undone and many of their records were lost wherein were mentioned numerous honourable lords. But the fame of Vieri de’ Cerchi remains, one of the greatest knights of his day and Prince of the White party. When called to Rome by Pope Boniface to try and pacify the said parties he went thither with many men at arms, all his own followers, which rather alarmed the Pope. There were also Niccolò Gentile and Borrigiano and all were knights of the Golden Spur.”[26] Vieri de’ Cerchi was the great antagonist of Corso Donati, head of the Black party, and “Florence,” writes Giovanni Villani, “was kept in such turmoil and danger by their enmity, that the city was often in an uproar, and every one was under arms.”

The palace came into the possession of the Bandini family, and it is said that the details of the Pazzi conspiracy were arranged here in the time of Bernardo Bandini [1478], and that his descendant Giovanni betrayed Florence to the Imperialists by signals from the top of the tower in 1530.

PALAZZO COCCHI
Piazza Sta. Croce. No. 1.

The name of Cocco di Donato occurs among the inhabitants of the quarter of Sta. Croce in 1328, and his descendants, Borghini and Francesco Cocchi, having made a large fortune in trade decided to build themselves a fine house. From the friars of the abbey of Fiesole they bought a house on the Piazza Sta. Croce and erected the palace we now see, which came into the possession of Borghini’s nephews after his death in 1474. It has often been attributed to Baccio d’Agnolo, and Vasari names it amongst the fine palaces built in Florence after 1470, but does not mention the architect. Signor Iodico Del Badia believes that part of the original house bought from the friars was incorporated with the more modern building; particularly the pilasters up to the spring of the arches, and the jambs in Via de’ Cocchi.[27] These jambs are supposed by some to be portions of the ancient walls of Florence destroyed in 1078, placed by the Peruzzi at one end of the street which traversed the old Roman amphitheatre. Cinelli however declares that the Cocchi bought the palace from the Dei family, for whom it was built by Raffaello del Bianco on the site of other houses and of the ancient loggia de’ Risaliti.

In the XVIIth century it was enlarged by the addition of some small houses in the rear, and remained in the possession of the Cocchi until the last of the family, Maddalena, married Marchese Pucci. It now belongs to her grandson Count Agostino Della Seta of Pisa.

PALAZZO CORSI SALVIATI (NOW VISCONTI ARCONATI)
Via Tornabuoni. No. 20.

The powerful and rich “consorteria,” or clan, of the Tornaquinci had their palaces, towers, loggie and shops, where now stands this palace. Their origin is lost in obscurity, but we know that the Emperor Otho I. allowed them to erect dams in the bed of the Arno near their houses. When the second circle of walls was built round Florence the gate, afterwards called S. Pancrazio, and a square, where now stands the Palazzo Strozzi, bore their name. Figliocaro Tornaquinci was Consul of the army in 1166 and in 1215, and his descendants fought at Montaperti on the side of the Guelphs in 1260. They divided into five different families in the XIVth century, of whom only the head of one branch, Simone, who took the name of Tornabuoni in 1393, interests us. His son Francesco was Commissary with the army of Carlo Malatesta and later was sent to Venice, to try and induce the Venetians to enter Lombardy against the Duke of Milan. A keen man of business, he stood high in favour with Cosimo de’ Medici and zealously worked to promote his return from exile in 1434. His daughter Lucrezia married Piero de’ Medici and their son, Lorenzo the Magnificent, owed much to her prudence and sagacity and inherited her poetic talent. Giovanni Tornabuoni, her brother, was treasurer to Sixtus IV. and head of the Medici bank at Rome, where his wife Francesca died in childbirth in September, 1477, and his letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici shows how deeply he mourned her. Vasari tells us that having caused a sepulchre to be made to her in the Minerva “he willed also that Domenico Ghirlandaio should paint the walls of the chapel wherein she was buried.”[28] Giovanni afterwards gave him the commission to paint the wonderful frescoes in the choir of Sta. Maria Novella, which we know from the diary of Luca Landucci were begun in 1486 and finished in 1490; not as Vasari states between 1481 and 1485.

Luca Landucci’s son Benedetto, who knew many of the people figured in the frescoes pointed them out in 1561, when he was eighty-nine years old, to Vincenzio Tornaquinci, who fortunately noted down his words.[29] Giovanni Tornabuoni is to the right of the great central window, kneeling bareheaded with his hands crossed over his breast, and opposite to him kneels his wife Francesca, her hands folded in prayer, with a white kerchief on her head. Signor E. Ridolfi exposes another of Vasari’s mistakes, which has often been blindly copied without verifying the dates.[30] Vasari states that “Ginevra de’ Benci, then a beautiful maiden” is one of the women in the fresco of the Visitation of Our Lady to S. Elizabeth. Ginevra was born in 1557, married to Luigi Niccolini in 1573 and died on the 17th August in the same year, so she could not have been painted by Ghirlandaio between 1486–1490. The beautiful maiden is Giovanni Tornabuoni’s daughter-in-law, the lovely and accomplished Giovanna degl’Albizzi, whose marriage to Lorenzo Tornabuoni was celebrated with such pomp in Florence in 1486. Two years later Niccolò Fiorentino made six medals of the Tornabuoni family. Two of Giovanni, one of his son Lorenzo, one of his daughter Lodovica, and two of his daughter-in-law Giovanna, and the latter indubitably represent the same person as the slender, swan-necked girl, in a splendid dress of gold brocade in Ghirlandaio’s fresco. She died, fortunately for her, before the plot to reinstate Piero de’ Medici was discovered. “On the 17th August, 1497,” writes Luca Landucci, “the Pratica met, and were in the palace from morning until midnight; they were more than one hundred and eighty. And by vote it was determined that they [the accused] should die, and all they had be confiscated. Five were executed; first Bernardo del Nero, and then Niccolò Ridolfi, Giovanni Cambi, Gianozzo Pucci and Lorenzo Tornabuoni, and all the people grieved for them. Every one wondered that such a thing should be done and could scarcely believe it. They were executed that very night, and I shed many tears when I saw the youth Lorenzo on a bier passing Tornaquinci just before daybreak.”

From Niccolò Fiorentino’s medals Signor Ridolfi has been able to identify the young girl visiting S. Anne as Ludovica, Giovanni Tornabuoni’s daughter, who was then about thirteen. Like her sister-in-law she is clothed in gold brocade and has her hair dressed in the same fashion. It seems impossible that Ghirlandaio did not paint Lucrezia de’ Medici among the other members of the Tornabuoni family, the more so that he chose for the subject of his fresco the life of S. John the Baptist, which she had translated into ottava rima. She died, it is true, three years before he began the work, but there must have been portraits of her in existence, although none have come down to us. Even after the death of her husband Piero, Lucrezia exercised more authority than usually fell to the share of Tuscan women; both Poliziano and Pulci praise her poetic gifts and Niccolò Valori writes: “she was very eloquent, as can be seen in her translations into our tongue of parts of Holy Writ.” He adds: “Lorenzo was most deferential to her, and after his father’s death loved and honoured her; showing in all his actions not only the affection borne to a mother, but such respect as is given to a father; it was hard for any to discern whether he most loved or honoured her.” Her nephew Lorenzo Tornabuoni was decapitated, and his family exiled, in 1497, for plotting against the liberty of the Republic in favour of the Medici. A descendant of his, Niccolò, Bishop of Borgo S. Sepolcro and ambassador to France towards the end of the XVIth century, introduced the tobacco plant into Tuscany, which for some time was called “l’erba Tornabuoni” after him.

Lorenzo Ridolfi bought the Tornabuoni houses and incorporated them into one large palace in the beginning of the XVIth century, but when he rebelled and his son was decapitated in 1575, all his estates were confiscated and the palace became the property of the Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici. He sold it to the rich citizen Jacopo Corsi, a friend and protector of Peri, and here, in a theatre built on purpose, his opera Dafne, with words by Rinuccini was given for the first time.

The Corsi are said to have come from Dicomano and one of the family fought under the Ghibelline standard at Montaperti and was exiled in 1268. Their name first appears in the magistrature of Florence in 1354, when Bardo Corsi was the first of nine Gonfaloniers of Justice and two years later the first of twenty-eight Priors of the family. Giovanni, his descendant, was entrusted by Clement VII. with the care of Alessandro de’ Medici, and with him, Ippolito and the Cardinal Passerini, he left Florence in 1527. After the capitulation of the city he was elected Gonfalonier of Justice and showed great cruelty in sentencing his fellow-citizens who were anti-Medicean. His brother Bardo made an enormous fortune in trade at Naples, and in 1617 bought the feudal estate of Cajazzo, when Philip of Spain created him a Marquess with remainder to his nephews, the sons of Jacopo, who purchased the old Tornabuoni palace. His granddaughter Laura married the Marquess Salviati and the palace then took the name of Corsi Salviati. When in 1864 it was decided to widen Via Tornabuoni the façade was thrown back many feet and the pretty little loggia, built by Cigoli, was moved from the southern corner of the palace opposite Palazzo Strozzi to the northern. It now belongs to the Marchioness Visconti Arconati.

PALAZZO CORSINI
Via Parione, No. 7; and Lung’Arno Corsini, No. 10.

The great palace of the Corsini family was built in the XVIIth century by Ciro Ferri and Pierfrancesco Silvani for the Marquess Filippo Corsini, where once stood the houses of the Compagni, the Segni and the Ardinghelli; the last had become the property of the Cardinal Giovan Carlo de’ Medici, and was sold after his death to pay his debts. The façade and chief entrance of the palace is in the Via Parione, but in the last century the terrace joining the two wings was erected in the Lung’Arno Corsini, with a large gateway into the courtyard, thus the palace now has two façades.

Neri, father of Bonacolto, from whose son Corsini the family took their name, came from Poggibonsi in the XIIIth century, writes the family historian Matteo. The ancient house in the Via Maggio, in which S. Andrea Corsini was born, is now a police station. Corsini’s son Neri was Consul of the Arte della Lana, or Guild of Wool, in 1270, twenty years later he was the first of fifty-six Priors of his family, and in 1295 Gonfalonier of Justice, an honour enjoyed by seven of his descendants. His nephew Tommaso, one of the greatest jurists of his day, expounded civil law as a young man at the University of Siena. He served the Florentine Republic in many embassies, and was successful in promoting treaties of peace with Siena, Perugia and Arezzo. Appointed to all the highest offices of his native city, he is mentioned by Villani as a most eloquent orator, whilst his reputation for honesty stood so high that Queen Joan of Naples named him her proxy for the sale of Prato to Florence. His last public act was in 1352, when Gonfalonier of Justice he made peace with the Visconti, and then retired to the monastery of S. Gaggio, of which he had been the principal founder. He died in 1366, leaving a large fortune to his sons. They erected in the adjoining church the fine monument by Orcagna to his memory, now in the Corsini chapel in S. Spirito.

His eldest son Giovanni, knight of the Order of S. John, sent by the Grand Master on an embassy to the Greek Emperor at Constantinople, by his beauty and his engaging manners won the heart of the Empress, and she persuaded her husband to make him Grand Seneschal of Armenia, in order to keep him at her court. His cousin and contemporary Matteo records that he was sent by the Pope and the Emperor jointly as ambassador to the King of Cyprus, and in 1380 was Governor of the Island of Rhodes. Pietro, the second son, was Bishop of Florence, but resigned his see on being made a Cardinal, and used all his influence to make peace between Florence and Gregory XI., which was at last concluded, chiefly through him, by Urban VI. Tommaso’s third son Filippo was a great jurist, like his father, and began his public career at twenty-six as ambassador to Siena, and then to Antwerp. The Emperor Charles IV. bestowed on him and his heirs after him the title and the prerogatives of a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. When the Ciompi riots broke out in 1378, Filippo Corsini was nigh losing his life, his house was sacked and burnt by the mob, and he fled the city until order was once more re-established. Though five times elected Gonfalonier of Justice, he was not often in Florence, as the Republic always turned to him when an ambassador was needed in those troubled times. He died in 1321, leaving to his children an honoured name and immense riches. The gentle Andrea, who at fifteen entered a Carmelite monastery, was his cousin. After taking the vows he was sent for a time to Paris to study theology at the Sorbonne. When the terrible plague of 1348 devastated Florence, his charity and devotion to the sick made him so popular that the people of Fiesole elected him their bishop, a choice ratified by the Pope. He lived for the poor and for his beloved cathedral, which he restored, and of which he built the façade, and was beatified soon after his death, and canonized in 1629 by Urban VIII. His younger brother Matteo went as a lad to London in 1342, where his uncle was Master of the Mint, and made a considerable fortune in trade. On returning to Florence twenty years later he began the family history already mentioned, and wrote the Rosaio della Vita, often quoted in the Della Crusca dictionary for purity of style.

Amerigo Corsini was the first Archbishop of Florence, as Martin V. raised the See to an archbishopric during his tenure, and the great dome of the cathedral was begun [1423] in his lifetime. His brother Bertoldo filled various high offices under the Republic, and was a devoted adherent of the Medici; while Luca, Bertoldo’s eldest son, was the Prior whose name is famous as shutting the door of the Palazzo della Signoria in the face of Piero de’ Medici after he had ceded Pisa and other towns to Charles VIII. of France in 1494. Another son, Piero, a gallant soldier and a good engineer, was Commissary of several of the small wars of the Republic and built the first fortifications of Leghorn, which withstood all the efforts of the Emperor Maximilian. Gherardo, another son, was a wealthy wool merchant, and four times one of the Dieci di Guerra. He became an adherent of the Medici, and his son Bertoldo was so trusted by the Duke Alessandro that he made him Governor of the newly-erected fortress of S. Giovanni. After the murder of the Duke he offered to give up the arms and ammunition to the people in order to fight for the liberty of the city. Such an offer from a well-known Pallesco, as the friends of the Medici were called, was regarded with suspicion, and Bertoldo fell between two stools. Banished as a rebel by the young Duke Cosimo I. and ruined by the confiscation of all he possessed, he joined the exiles, fought at Montemurlo, Siena and Orbetello, where he was taken prisoner and sold to the Duke for 600 scudi. He was decapitated in March 1555.

With the rich merchant Bartolommeo, elected a Senator in 1601, the Corsini entered into the ranks of the great landed proprietors. He bought the large feudal estates of Sismano, Cavigliano and Civitella, in the Roman States, and many of the fine villas still belonging to the family in Tuscany were either built or enlarged by him. His nephew Filippo, created Marquess of Sismano, etc., by Urban VIII. in 1629, was a partner in the Medici bank at Rome, besides having a rich silk and wool business of his own. He married Maria Maddalena Machiavelli, a rich heiress, who bought the house in Via Parione, afterwards incorporated in the large Corsini palace, where the Cardinal Giovan Carlo de’ Medici had a private theatre, and used to hold most unclerical orgies. The Grand Duke Ferdinando II. created him a Senator, and in 1644 made his son Bartolommeo Marquess of Laiatico, a title still used by the family, as is that of Marquess of Giovagallo, an estate in the Lunigiana bought by Bartolommeo from the Spanish crown. His son Filippo was a friend of the young Prince Cosimo de’ Medici, and accompanied him on a tour through Europe. The description he wrote, illustrated with water-colour drawings of the principal places they visited, is in the Laurentian library, and has been translated into English. The large palace was built by him after the design of Silvani, and the gallery augmented by the purchase of many fine pictures.

His brother Lorenzo was destined to raise the fortunes of his house still higher. Elected Pope in 1730, under the name of Clement XII., it is said that he implored the cardinals to let an old, half-blind man die in peace, and to choose another pope. Clement XII. began his pontificate by dismissing Cardinal Coscia, the venal favourite of his predecessor, by reforming the administration of justice, and by replacing the debased currency by an emission of new coin. He founded the gallery of the Campidoglio, restored the Vatican, and built the fountain of Trevi, the façades of S. Giovanni de’ Fiorentini, S. Giovanni in Laterano, and several other churches. But much of this was done with money derived from the abominable giuoco del lotto, called by Mocenigo, the Venetian ambassador, “the curse and the ruin of the people.” It had been abolished by Benedict XIII., when Clement, under the specious pretext that his subjects would gamble and therefore had better spend their money at home, restored it. He would have left a greater name had he shown less partiality to his own family. His two nephews were summoned to Rome. Bartolommeo was created Prince of Sismano, Duke of Casigliano, and Captain-General of the Papal Guards; he identified himself entirely with the Spanish party, seduced by Charles III., who hinted that Spain would renounce in his favour her claims on Tuscany and Parma if he aided her in securing the Kingdom of Naples. The Congress of Vienna put an end to these ambitious projects, and as some consolation he was made Viceroy of Sicily and a Grandee of Spain. Neri, brought up as a page of Cosimo III., showed considerable ability in pleading his master’s cause at various foreign courts, and when the future of Tuscany was discussed at Cambray in 1723. On his return he was named Captain of the Guards and when his uncle became Pope, the diplomatist and soldier was suddenly transformed into a Cardinal. He practically ruled the Papal States, not only under Clement XII., but under three of his successors. The great Corsini palace at Rome was built by him, and filled with a fine collection of works of art. Intensely hostile to the Jesuits, he used all his influence to obtain the suppression of the Order, but died before the decree against them was promulgated. An infant of the family was made a Knight of Malta while still in swaddling clothes and Prior of Pisa at four years old, to the indignation of the Grand Master of the Order; another was Apostolic pro-notary while a lad, and a Cardinal at twenty-four.

Prince Tommaso Corsini began life as Chamberlain to the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo, but when Florence was occupied by the French and “Death to the aristocrats” was the popular cry, he fled to Sicily. When Tuscany had been transformed into the Kingdom of Etruria he returned, and became Master of the Household to the Queen Maria Louisa, who sent him to receive Napoleon I. at Bologna. He impressed the Emperor so favourably that he made him a Senator and a Count of the Empire, and entrusted him with the difficult mission of introducing the French code of laws into Rome. During the exciting days of 1848 he was Senator of Rome, but when Pius IX. abandoned the popular party, Prince Corsini had to fly for his life, and only re-entered Rome with the French troops. A man of considerable culture, he enriched the celebrated library in the palace on the Lungara, and added many fine pictures to the Corsini galleries in Rome and in Florence. His brother Don Neri was one of the most popular men in Tuscany. He advocated her independence at the Congress of Vienna, and obtained the restitution of most of the art treasures which had been carried away to Paris. As Minister of the Interior under Ferdinando III., he devoted himself to ameliorating the condition of the people, made new roads, and gave a great impulse to the great work of draining the Val di Chiana. A strong free-trader, he successfully withstood his colleagues who wished to impose a heavy tax on corn; and imbued with a distrust and dislike of the Jesuits, he resolutely set his face against their re-admittance into Tuscany. His nephew and namesake Don Neri, Marquess of Laiatico, was sent as Governor to Leghorn in 1847, when the city was on the brink of a revolution. By his tact he succeeded in restoring peace, but the Grand Duke and his counsellors did not approve of his liberal ideas, and he was recalled. His son Don Tommaso, the present Prince Corsini, is immensely popular, and by his learning and kindly hospitality has endeared himself to all his fellow-citizens.

PALAZZO DAVANZATI
Via Porta Rossa. No. 9.

The stern old Davanzati palace is more like a huge tower intended for defence than a house to live in. The fine doorway, with Donatello’s magnificent coat-of-arms high above it, leads into a curiously-shaped courtyard, from which a covered staircase zigzags from one balcony to another up to the loggia at the summit. The palazzo is a splendid example of the architecture of the XIVth century, but who designed it is not known. Sadly defaced by shops which crowd the ground floor it has an air of squalor, which, however, does not detract from its massive grandeur. The Davanzati built their palace on the site of houses and towers which belonged to the ancient and powerful family of the Bostichi, who had already fallen from their high estate before Dante wrote. Later, Bernardo Davanzati, the translator of Tacitus, added their name to his own, and attempted to claim an illusory descent from them. He might have been satisfied with going back to his gallant ancestor Davanzato, who fought in the ranks of the Guelphs at Monteperti in 1260. His son Lottieri was five times a Prior, thrice one of the Buonomini, and thrice Gonfalonier of his quarter; while forty-four of the family sat at various times as Priors in the Palazzo de’ Signori. Niccolò Davanzati founded the beautiful convent of Doccia on the slopes of Fiesole in 1413,[31] and he probably also built this fine palace.

COURTYARD OF PALAZZO DAVANZATI.

The Davanzati must have been a clear-headed, well-spoken race, as their name often appears among the ambassadors sent by Florence to other states. In 1434 Giuliano, the son of Niccolò, “a strong man with a fluent tongue,” Ammirato calls him, came to great honour. He was Gonfalonier of Justice when Eugenius III. consecrated the cathedral of Sta. Maria del Fiore, and during the service the Pope dubbed him a Knight of the Golden Spur with his own hands. In memory of this a shield with the arms of the Pope was placed, and still exists, on the central pillar in the courtyard, with Ex privilegio Eugenii III. D. Julianus Davanzati eques inscribed below the coat-of-arms. Three of the family—Giovanni, who fought at Poppi against the Prince of Orange in 1529, his brother Piero, who was one of the Two Hundred in 1532, and Antonfrancesco, son of Giuliano, who was charged to provide funds for provisioning the besieged city—were zealous patriots. The latter was banished and died no one knows where, leaving his wife, Lucrezia Ginori, with a little son, to whom, perceiving his uncommon intelligence, “as fertile land left uncultivated produces more weeds than sterile soil,” she gave an excellent education. Bernardo was put into the bank when a lad, but devoted all the time he could spare from business to classical and economic studies, and at eighteen was already a member of the Academy of Florence.

Grazzini, better known as Lasca, one of the founders of the Academy, quarrelled with his fellow-academicians and wrote a sarcastic poem, in which young Bernardo Davanzati is the only member he does not abuse.

“Quel garzonetto non ha’n corpo fiele;

Poi fa si belle e si dotte orazioni,

Che chi non l’ama e ben goffo e crudele.

Calate omai le vele,

O tutti voi dal maggiore al minore,

Che siete dolci e di mezzo sapore.

E se bramate onore,

Fate nell’academia sopratutto

Favellar sempre e legger quel bel putto.”[32]

Bernardo Davanzati’s translation of Tacitus is remarkable for conciseness and force of language, though occasionally lacking in dignity. He also wrote one of the first treatises on coinage, Della Moneta, another on Tuscan agriculture, and a history of the separation of England from the Church of Rome, Storia della Scisma. “He was,” writes Francesco Rondinelli, “of small stature and dark complexion. His eyes were bright, his hair black, and he had but little beard. The forehead was furrowed and lined, as were his cheeks, and his aspect was somewhat stern. In dress he favoured the parsimony and decorum of ancient times; sober in eating and drinking, curt and straightforward in speech, for words, like coins, are more esteemed when they contain large value in a small compass. By some he was called Peppercorn, it may be from his brown and wrinkled face, but more likely from the knowledge, sharp wit and learning contained in so small a body. He was impatient of praise, never esteeming his work perfect. The errors of others he blamed by silence rather than by correction, and often lamented that fortune did not favour those honest, good and modest men, who doing much and asking little, are not appreciated; but rather certain presumptuous people, who have an excellent opinion of and praise themselves, though they are of small account. Besides Latin, he knew Greek, and was a good arithmetician; his judgment was so excellent in all things that he enjoyed the singular happiness of hearing his works praised during his lifetime. It was said by a man of great learning that he collected the jewels of Florentine speech from the pebbles of the Arno, to set in the gold of Tacitus.”

Bernardo’s grandson and namesake came to an untimely death by throwing himself off the top of the tower of the old palace into the courtyard below. The family, by a curious fatality, came to an end by the death of Carlo Davanzati in 1838, in the same way and at the same spot. The palace now belongs to Signor Volpi.

PALAZZO DONATI
Piazza S. Piero Maggiore.

But little remains of the many palaces and towers of this once powerful family. Several stood in the Corso, nearly opposite to those of the Portinari, where two of their grey towers still frown defiance at passers-by and a small square bears their name. Here lived Manetto Donati, whose daughter Gemma became the wife of Dante. Forese Donati was one of the poet’s dearest friends, whilst his brother Corso, of whom more anon, became his deadliest enemy. Their sister, the beautiful Piccarda, who took the habit of S. Clare as a young girl, but was torn from her quiet convent and forced by Corso Donati to break her vows and marry, is one of the most touching figures in the Paradiso. Other Donati palaces, amongst them that of the famous Corso, stood round the church of S. Piero Maggiore founded by the family in the IXth century. Several of them joined the Crusades and died in the Holy Land, and many were made Knights of the Golden Spur by the Emperors Henry II. and Conrad of Swabia. Rivalry had always existed between the Donati and the Cerchi; it became acute when the Neri, or Black Party, came from Pistoja to seek aid from Corso Donati, and the Bianchi, or White Party, turned for help to Vieri de’ Cerchi. “The Priors and other good citizens,” writes Machiavelli, “feared every hour that they would come to blows, and the city be divided into two camps. They therefore appealed to the Pope, praying him to use his authority and put an end to these quarrels with which they were unable to cope. The Holy Father sent for Messer Vieri, and commanded him to make peace with the Donati. At this he expressed astonishment, saying he bore them no malice, and as making peace implied the existence of war, he could not see why, there being no war, it should be necessary to make peace. So Messer Vieri returned from Rome without concluding anything, and the ill-feeling grew apace.... Men being in this excited state, it happened that the Cerchi and the Donati met at a funeral service, and from words came to blows; but for the moment the tumult was appeased. Then the Cerchi decided to attack the Donati, but were repulsed by the bravery of Messer Corso, and many of their followers were wounded. The whole city was in a tumult, the Signori and the laws were trodden under foot by the fury of the more powerful. The Donati and their party were afraid because they were the weaker, so Messer Corso summoned the heads of the Blacks and the Captains of the Party, and it was decided to ask the Pope to send one of royal blood to reform the city, thinking thereby to break the power of the Whites. The meeting and its deliberation was notified to the Priors, and magnified by the adverse party into a plot against liberty. As both sides had armed the Signori, of whom Dante was one [1301], animated by his advice and tranquil courage, called the people to arms, and then forced the leaders of the opposite factions to disarm, and banished Messer Corso Donati with many of the Black Party.”

TOWER OF THE DONATI.

Messer Corso went to Rome and persuaded the Pope to send Charles of Valois, brother of the King of France, who was on his way to Sicily, to pacify Florence. After swearing solemnly to preserve peace Charles armed his followers, and the alarm in the city was not lessened by the arrival of Corso with all the exiles. The prisons were burst open, the Priors relegated to private life, and for five days the houses of the White Party were given up to plunder and arson. A new Signoria was elected, entirely formed of the Blacks, and Charles named Cante di Gabbrielli, one of his adherents, Podestà. Proscriptions commenced, and one of the first names on the list was that of Dante.

Machiavelli describes Corso Donati as “a promoter of every disagreement and every tumult; all who desired to attain anything extraordinary turned to him, so that he was hated by many citizens of repute.... But the authority wielded by him was such that he was feared by all. To deprive him of the popular favour it was spread about that he sought to seize the State, to which his magnificent way of living, far beyond the ordinary, lent colour. After he had taken to wife the daughter of Uguccione della Faggiuola, head of the Ghibelline and the White Party, and most powerful in Tuscany, this report gained more credit. The marriage encouraged his enemies and induced the people to abandon him, and many joined his adversaries. Their leaders were Rosso della Tosa, Pazzino de’ Pazzi, Geri Spini and Berto Brunelleschi who, with their followers, and a great concourse of people, went armed to the palace of the Signori. The Signori ordered Piero Branca, Captain of the People, to accuse Messer Corso of desiring to make himself tyrant of Florence by the aid of Uguccione. He was cited to appear, and then condemned as a rebel in contumaciam, and only two hours elapsed between the accusation and the condemnation. After the delivery of the sentence the Signori and the Compagnie of the People, with their banners, went to take him. Messer Corso, whose courage failed not when he saw himself abandoned by many and heard of his condemnation, was not abashed by the authority of the Signori or the number of his assailants, but fortified his houses, hoping to be able to defend himself until the arrival of Uguccione, to whom he had sent for help. His houses and the streets near by had been closed by him and fortified by his adherents, and their defence was so valiant that the people, although numerous, could not advance. The struggle was great, with dead and wounded on both sides. Seeing that nothing was to be done in the open the people took possession of the houses adjoining his and, breaking through the walls, burst into his house. Finding himself surrounded by enemies and despairing of victory, or of aid from Uguccione, Messer Corso decided to try and save his life. Placing himself and Gherardo Bordoni at the head of some of his strongest and most trusted friends, he charged the enemy with such impetuosity that they fell back, and fighting he was able to pass through their ranks and leave the city by the Porta Sta. Croce. Many, however, pursued him, Gherardo was killed on the banks of the Affrico by Boccaccio Cavicciulli, whilst some Catalan horsemen, soldiers of the Signoria, came up with Messer Corso at Rovezzano and took him prisoner. On the way back to Florence, to avoid meeting his victorious enemies face to face and being tortured by them, he threw himself off his horse, and thus, lying on the ground, was killed by one of his captors. The monks of S. Salvi found his body and buried it without any honours. Such was the end of Messer Corso, to whom both his country and the Black Party owed much good and much ill. Had his disposition been of a gentler kind, his memory would be more honoured.” Dino Compagni says that Corso Donati was ill and suffering from gout at the time of his flight. “Much talk there was of the evil manner of his death, according as to whether they were friends or enemies,” continues the old chronicler, “but to speak truthfully his life was perilous [for the quiet of Florence] and his death was blameworthy. He was a knight of great courage and of old name, of gentle blood and well-mannered, very handsome, even in his old age, finely built, with delicate features and a pale complexion; a pleasant, wise and ornate speaker, and always occupied with important affairs, a consort and a friend of great lords and noble persons, counting many adherents and renowned throughout Italy. He was an enemy to the people and to popular government, well-loved by his partisans, but full of evil designs, wicked and astute.”

PALAZZO FERONI (NOW AMERIGHI)
Via de’ Serragli. No. 6.

A peasant named Balducci, from Vinci, was the ancestor of the Feroni family. One of his descendants, of the name of Ferone, established himself at Empoli as a dyer, and had dealings with Holland, where his grandson Francesco Feroni made a large fortune. Prince Cosimo de’ Medici made his acquaintance during his travels, and when he became Grand Duke summoned him to Florence, made him a citizen and a Senator, and in 1681 Marquess of Bellavista. He left an enormous fortune to his descendants, one of whom bought several houses in Via de’ Serragli, and built this large palace, which the Marquess Ubaldo Feroni enlarged in 1778. It was afterwards again considerably augmented by the addition of the suppressed church and monastery of S. Giuseppe, when another entrance into the spacious courtyard was made from Via S. Frediano. In the same year his brother the Marquess Alessandro bought the larger half of the ancient Palazzo Spini, which is sometimes called Feroni. In another palace in the Via Faenza they had a gallery of pictures, which the last of the family bequeathed to the city of Florence in 1850.

PALAZZO RICASOLI FIRIDOLFI
Via Maggio. No. 7.

The fine palace now inhabited by the Baroness Ricasoli Firidolfi and her children was built by the Ridolfi family on the site of houses belonging to various families, in the XVth century, and bought in 1736 by Maria Lucrezia Firidolfi for her sons. The architect is unknown, but the palace, with its fine courtyard, evidently dates from the XVth century. On the first floor is a tiny chapel, entirely painted in oils by Giorgio Vasari in a manner very different from his usual style. Above the altar is a marble bas-relief of the Madonna and Child with S. John, by Rossellini.

The history of this family is a complicated and a curious one. Divided in the XIIth century into three branches, of which one retained the old name of Firidolfi, whilst the other two took that of Ricasoli, they were again reunited after eight hundred years in the person of the late Baron Giovanni Ricasoli Firidolfi. His mother was the only daughter of the great statesman Baron Bettino Ricasoli, his father the sole surviving son of Giovanni Francesco Ricasoli di Meleto, who married the only daughter of the last of the Firidolfi, whose name he added to his own.

One of those long-bearded northmen (Longobardi), who came into Italy in the VIth century, is said to have settled in the Mugello. But the first of the family of whom we have documentary evidence is Geremia, son of Ildebrando, lord of great estates in the Mugello and of nearly the whole province of the Chianti, who being old, and without children, made large donations to the Church. On the death of his first wife he married a young girl, by whom he had one son, Ridolfo, inscribed among the great Barons of Tuscany in a deed of 1029. From him the family took the name of Firidolfi (de filiis Rudolphi). Ranieri Firidolfi fought under Frederick Barbarossa, and obtained in fief the castles of Campi and of Tornano, and, according to a tradition in the family, the strong castle of Brolio. This originally belonged to Bonifazio, Marquess of Tuscany, who in 1009 gave it to the monks of the Badia of Florence, a donation confirmed by the Emperor Henry II. in 1012, and by Henry IV. in 1074. Henry VI. not only confirmed his father’s gifts to Ranieri, but added to them the castles of Moriano and of Ricasoli, not far from Fiesole, from which the most powerful branch of the family took its name.

Alberto Ricasoli, Ranieri’s son, served under the Emperor Otho IV., who increased the privileges bestowed by former emperors, and in 1230 he was elected Podestà of Siena. From his sons Ranieri and Ugo descended the Ricasoli di Meleto of Ponte alla Carraja, and the great baronial family. Ugo fought in the Guelph ranks at Montaperti, and in revenge the Ghibellines destroyed his castle of Ricasoli, for which he obtained compensation when his party returned to power. Bindaccio, his grandson, showed such valour at the battles of Montecatini and Altopascio that the Bolognese chose him as their Podestà, and Cardinal Albornoz made him Captain-General of the Papal forces. One of his sons was a Bishop of Florence, whilst another, Albertaccio, was so gallant a soldier that at his death in 1335 the Republic gave him a public funeral, and decreed that his arms, with the banner of the people and of the Guelph party, should be placed above his tomb in Sta. Croce.

Ranieri Ricasoli di Meleto, a strong partisan of the Medici, was sent to Flanders after the Pazzi conspiracy to sequester the monies in their banks in Bruges, Ghent, etc. He was a very rich merchant, and built the stately old Ricasoli palace on the Lung’Arno Corsini in 1480, said to have been designed by Michelozzi (now the Hotel New York). Cinelli describes the fine collection of pictures, and the beautiful garden and loggia opposite (where now is the Hotel Bristol), then connected with the palace by a passage under the street.[33] One of Ranieri’s descendants was an intimate friend of Alfieri, whose tragedy Saul was first acted in the private theatre of the Ricasoli palace.

Simone Ricasoli, son of Ranieri, was brought up with Lorenzo the Magnificent, and when the young Cardinal Giovanni, his son, went to Rome, Lorenzo confided him to the care of his devoted friend. On Giovanni becoming Pope as Leo X., he summoned another Ricasoli, Antonio, to direct the iniquitous war which despoiled the Della Rovere of the Duchy of Urbino in favour of his own nephew Lorenzo de’ Medici. The assault and capture of the strong fortress of S. Leo was famous in the annals of that time. In 1526 he was Commissary of the war with Siena, and the defeat of the Florentine troops was attributed to him; so on the exile of the Medici the following year he was condemned to death and his estates were forfeited. He escaped to Rome, and found an asylum with Clement VII. until Florence was once more ruled by the Medici, when he was created a Senator. After the battle of Montemurlo he sat as one of the judges, and was distinguished for the harsh brutality of his sentences on the wretched prisoners. His sons served Cosimo I. well by sowing discord in Siena, and when the city fell into the hands of the Duke he rewarded Giulio Ricasoli by restoring to him the old feudal castles of Trappola, Rocca Guicciarda and Sagona, which the Florentine Republic had confiscated in 1395. Giulio then reassumed the old title of Baron, which his ancestors had refused to exchange for the higher one of Count. The name of Ricasoli is connected with the island of Malta, as Giovanfrancesco, a knight of the Order, gave such large sums towards building the fortifications that one of the forts was named after him.[34]

The life of Bettino Ricasoli, one of the makers of United Italy, is too well known to need repetition here, and would take up too much space. “Il fiero Barone” (the proud, or great, Baron), as the Florentines called him (he was, I believe, the only Baron of Tuscany), died in an old family palace in the Via del Cocomero, now, according to the baneful habit they have in Florence of altering the names of ancient streets, and thus sweeping away the historical landmarks of the city, the Via Ricasoli.

PALAZZO FOSSI
Via de’ Benci. No. 20.

Nearly all the palaces on the eastern side of Via de’ Benci once belonged to the Alberti and the street was called after them, until the Benci crossed the Arno and established themselves here, when it became Via de’ Benci. This palace was bought from Francesco degl’Alberti in 1456 by Duccio Mellini, whose family were rich bankers and great patrons of the arts. The fine pulpit in Sta. Croce by Benedetto da Majano was erected by them. Michelangelo has been named as the architect of the characteristic and elegant palace, but it bears no resemblance to his handiwork, and evidently dates from the middle of the XVIth century. It is one of the few which still preserves, though in a sad state of ruin, a frescoed façade, painted by Stalf, a Flemish artist, after the designs of Francesco Salviati. The Mellini sold it in 1634, since when it has changed hands often, and now belongs to Signor Fossi.

DOORWAY OF PALAZZO FRESCOBALDI.

PALAZZO FRESCOBALDI
Piazza de’ Frescobaldi. No. 1.

Many were the houses belonging to the great family of Frescobaldi in the Borgo S. Jacopo and in the Via S. Spirito, besides the great palace in the Piazza de’ Frescobaldi. Opposite to the latter stood one of their towers and their loggia, of which a capital remains built into the wall of a small house. Another tower was near the church of S. Jacopo. The old palace in the Piazza in which Pope Gregory lodged in 1272 was burnt during the popular rising in 1343, but was rebuilt with greater magnificence. Afterwards it became a monastery, but when Florence became the capital the monks gave place to the Admiralty. It is now a communal school, and the fine façade is fast falling to pieces.

According to Verino, the Frescobaldi came originally from Germany. They were lords of several castles in the Val di Pesa in very early times, and their name appears among the first Consuls and Elders of Florence. One of them, Messer Lamberto di Fresco di Baldo, built the first bridge (of wood) of Sta. Trinita across the Arno in 1252. His sons Lapo and Neri fought at the battle of Montaperti on the side of the Guelphs, and their cousin Berto rode by the side of King Charles of Anjou and bore his banner at the famous battle of Campaldino in 1282. Three years later Ghino de’ Frescobaldi was created a Prior, but the power, military fame and riches, of the family aroused the jealousy of the popular party. As Grandi they were declared incapable of holding any office, which they bitterly resented; and were driven to fury by the exile of Teglia de’ Frescobaldi, who had led the Florentine army to victory in 1303, and was too popular with his soldiers to please a republican government. Swearing to be revenged, he took service with Castruccio Castrocane, Lord of Lucca, and attempted to seize Montelupo and Capraja, while some of his relatives conspired to open the gates of Florence to her enemy. All those who were implicated in the plot were banished, and the cruelty and injustice of the newly created magistrate, “the Preserver of Peace,” drove the Grandi to desperation, and ended in the revolt of the great Oltrarno families, so graphically described by Villani (see p. 40). For some hours the Frescobaldi defended their Piazza and palaces, but were at last forced to capitulate. Their houses and towers were destroyed, and those members of the family who were not beheaded or imprisoned, were banished.

There must also be mentioned the poet Dino de’ Frescobaldi, called by Boccaccio “famosissimo dicitore in rima in Firenze.” The world owes him a vast debt of gratitude, for he contrived to save the first seven cantos of the Inferno, when all that belonged to his friend Dante was confiscated, and sent them after him to the Marchese Malaspina’s castle in the Lunigiana. Matteo, Dino’s son, was also a poet, and Lionardo, whose interesting account of his travels in Egypt and the Holy Land in 1383 has been published, was, it is believed, a descendant of his.

Battista de’ Frescobaldi conspired against Lorenzo the Magnificent and was beheaded, and his brother Giuliano died by the side of Ferruccio Ferrucci in the battle of Gavinana. Bartolomeo was so ardent a republican that he withdrew from the world when the Medici attained to power, but his descendant Matteo was made a Senator in 1645. The present representative of the Frescobaldi lives in one of the old family palaces in Via S. Spirito.

PALAZZO GHERADESCA
Borgo Pinti. No. 93.

The historian Bartolommeo Scala, son of a miller of Colle in the Val d’Elsa, built this palace. Cosimo de’ Medici, and his son Piero after him, paid for his education, and he became Chancellor of the Republic of Florence and was Gonfalonier of Justice in 1486. His learning was undeniable, but Lorenzo the Magnificent evidently was not satisfied with his Latin style, as he privately made Poliziano correct the despatches and letters written by Scala in the name of the Republic. At length the Chancellor suspected who was the real author of the corrections and a deadly hatred ensued between the two men. The hatred was embittered by the refusal of Scala’s beautiful and clever daughter Alessandra to listen to Poliziano, and by her marriage with Michael Tarcagnota, an inferior poet, but a better-tempered and a better-looking man than the famous Agnolo Poliziano.

Guido Scala, Bartolommeo’s grandson, died childless in 1581 and left the palace to Alessandro de’ Medici, Archbishop of Florence, afterwards Pope Leo XI. It then became the property of the Counts Gheradesca who laid out a beautiful garden and now it belongs to the Meridionale Railway Company.

PALAZZO GIANFIGLIAZZI
Via Tornabuoni. No. 1.

The palace, or rather the palaces, of the great family of the Gianfigliazzi faced the Ponte a Sta. Trinita at the corner of the Lung’Arno Corsini and the Via Tornabuoni. As Guelphs they were expelled the city after the battle of Montaperti in 1260, but returned, and three of them signed the famous peace of 1280. Eight years later their palaces were nearly destroyed by the terrible flood which did so much damage in Florence. The palaces Nos. 2 and 4 on the Lung’Arno Corsini also belonged to them; in the former, with the lion of the Gianfigliazzi carved by Desiderio da Settignano in the coat of arms on the façade, the great poet Alfieri lived for some time, and there he died.

At the beginning of the XVth century they bought from the Fastelli the palace adjoining the church of Sta. Trinita, with a tower which had been built by the Ruggerini, a Guelph family who were ruined in 1260. The arms of the three different owners are still on the façade. The loggia of the Gianfigliazzi, on the opposite side of the church at the corner of the Via di Parione, was only closed and turned into a shop in 1732.

The Gianfigliazzi descend from a Giovanni son of Azzo (Gianni figlio d’Azzo), who signed a convention with Siena in 1201. Two of the family sat in the Council of Elders in 1278 and 1279; a few years later they were excluded from office as nobles and their name only appears again among the magistrates of the city after the departure of the tyrant Duke of Athens. Geri de’ Gianfigliazzi was a poet and a friend of Petrarch; Rinaldo, sent as Commissary of War against Visconti, was created a Count of the Holy Roman Empire by the Emperor Robert in 1402; and Bongianni, another gallant soldier, was publicly knighted by the Signoria in 1467 and died at the head of his troops under the walls of Pietrasanta. His son Jacopo was one of the twelve citizens named by Clement VII. to “reform” the State and elect Alessandro de’ Medici absolute ruler of Florence. Several of the family were Senators under the Medici, until the family became extinct in 1764.

PALAZZO GINORI
Via de’ Ginori. No. 2.

The Ginori palace once belonged to Bacio Bandinelli who died there in 1559. There is a fine courtyard and the large saloon on the first floor is handsome; the building has been restored but not much spoiled. The Ginori descend from a notary who came to Florence from Calenzano, in the Val di Marino, in 1304, and lived close to the present palace of his descendants. His son Gino was the first of twenty-six Priors of the family and from him they took their name. Piero his grandson, the first Gonfalonier of five of his house in 1423, was an important person in the city and a friend of Giovanni de’ Medici, with whom he contributed towards the building of S. Lorenzo.

Benvenuto Cellini tells us that for Federigo Ginori, “a young man of a very lofty spirit,” he made a medal “with Atlas bearing the world upon his shoulders, and applied to Michelangelo for a design. Michelangelo made this answer: ‘Go and find out a young goldsmith named Benvenuto; he will serve you admirably, and certainly he does not stand in need of sketches by me. However to prevent your thinking that I want to save myself the trouble of so slight a matter, I will gladly sketch you something; but meanwhile speak to Benvenuto, and let him make a model, he can then execute the better of the two designs.’ Federigo Ginori came to me, and told me what he wanted, adding thereto how Michelangelo had praised me, and how he had suggested I should make a waxen model while he undertook to supply a sketch. The words of that great man so heartened me, that I set to work at once with eagerness ... and when Michelangelo saw it, he praised it to the skies. This was a figure, as I have said, chiselled on a plate of gold; Atlas had the heaven upon his back, made out of a crystal ball, engraved with the zodiac upon a field of lapis-lazuli. The whole composition produced an indescribably fine effect; and under it ran the legend Summa tulisse juvat.”[35] Federigo was killed during the siege of Florence and his brother Leonardo, a spendthrift and a gambler, was the husband of the beautiful Caterina Soderini, whose story is a sad one. Forced by her father to forget her early love the poet Luigi Alamanni, and married to Leonardo Ginori, who had to fly to Naples to escape from his creditors, she was exposed to the persecutions of the Duke Alessandro de’ Medici, and was the innocent cause of his murder (see p. 263). Her son Bartolommeo, famed for his strength and great stature, was chosen by Giovan Bologna for the model of the young man in his group of the rape of the Sabines. From him descended the Senator Carlo Ginori who founded the well-known china manufactory at Doccia near Florence in 1740. He chartered a ship for China and she brought back, not only models and specimens of the various earths used in making china, but many rare plants and the first gold fish that were seen in Europe.[36] The present Marquess Ginori lives in the old palace, and the Doccia factory, which has become a Company under the name of Richard Ginori, still keeps up its reputation.

PALAZZO GINORI CONTI
Via Cavour. No. 7.

From the Riccardi palace to Via Guelfa nearly all the houses once belonged to various members of the Medici family, who migrated from their original dwellings in the centre of Florence to settle near S. Lorenzo, and in this palace, often mentioned as “la casa vecchia” (the old house), Cosimo the Elder was born. In those days the upper storeys of most of the buildings projected over the street, supported on brackets of stone or of wood, until in 1536 peremptory orders were given to demolish all the over-hanging façades in Via Larga and to rebuild them straight up from the ground floor, for the entrance into the city of Margarita of Austria, the bride of Duke Alessandro de’ Medici. The house was sold by Ferdinando II. to the Ughi, and after changing hands several times was bought by Giovacchino Rossini, to whose memory an inscription was placed on the front of the house. It now belongs to Prince Ginori Conti.

The often repeated story that Lorenzino de’ Medici’s house was destroyed and a street, called the Chiasso del Traditore, made where it stood, is entirely opposed to all documentary evidence. In 1537 Lorenzino was condemned as a traitor and according to old custom the front of his house, or rather of the room in which he murdered his cousin Alessandro, was torn down. In 1568, 1604 and 1611, when the “old house” and that of Lorenzino passed from one member of the Medici family to another, the latter is always mentioned as “partly destroyed.” When the two houses were sold to Alamanno Ughi in 1646 the description runs: “a large house in Via Larga, with the destroyed part adjoining the said house and the rooms which are in the said destroyed part.” The new proprietor let the ground floor “under the ruined part of the small house” as a shop in 1648, but fifty years later the shop was turned into stables. It was only in 1736, as we learn from the Diario of Settimanni, that “Ughi finished restoring his house in Via Larga adjoining the palace of the Marchese Cosimo Riccardi. This was the house which belonged to Lorenzo di Pier Francesco di Lorenzo de’ Medici, who exactly two hundred years ago murdered the Duke Alessandro.... Until this restoration the hole, over sixteen braccie wide, which had been made in the front of the house was to be seen.” There is no mention of any street, nor of any prohibition as to building on the site of the house in which the murder had been committed. Signor Corrazzini however states that Ughi, having heard a rumour that some such prohibition existed, petitioned the Grand Duke to affirm that he and his heirs were at liberty to build on the site as they pleased, and this Ferdinando did.[37] The house is No. 5. Via Cavour, with three windows, wedged in between the Palazzo Riccardi and the palace of Prince Ginori Conti.

PALAZZO GINORI-VENTURI
Via della Scala. No. 89.

This palace was built by Bernardo Rucellai on the site of an old leper hospital, and annexed to it were the celebrated Oricellari gardens, meeting place of the Platonic Academy founded by Cosimo the Elder. Vasari states that Leon Battista Alberti “designed the house and the garden of the Rucellai in Via della Scala, the house is built with great knowledge and is most convenient, having among other things two loggie, one to the south, the other to the west, both are beautiful.” But Vasari is wrong, as the gardens were bought and the house was built in 1482, two years after the death of Alberti. In these gardens Machiavelli read aloud his Discourses on the First Decade of Livy to the assembled academicians, and Giovanni Rucellai’s Rosmunda was acted before Leo X. on his first visit to Florence after his election as pope. When the conspiracy against the Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici was discovered, in which Machiavelli was implicated, and which cost two of the members their lives, the Academy was suppressed. The palace and the gardens were confiscated by the Medici in 1527, but given back to the Rucellai four years later by the Duke Alessandro. In 1537 Palla Rucellai was despoiled of all his possessions for opposing the election of Cosimo, son of Giovanni delle Bande Nere, to the throne. Palace and gardens then became the abode, first of Eleonora degl’Albizzi, mistress of Cosimo I., and afterwards of Bianca Cappello, the account of whose wonderful entertainment to the Grand Duke Francesco I., her lover, is curious reading.[38] It then passed to the Orsini, and in 1640 became the property of the Cardinal Giovan Carlo de’ Medici, whose wild orgies and bacchanalian feasts made a strange contrast to the philosophical discussions of the academicians of former days. On the death of the Cardinal, leaving immense debts, gardens and palace were bought by Ferdinando Ridolfi, Marquis of Montescudaro. The Strozzi inherited the property, and sold it to Prince Orloff. It now belongs to the Marquis Ippolito Ginori, whose wife is a descendant of the original owner, Rucellai; but the Oricellari gardens have been barbarously cut in two, and their glory has departed.

PALAZZO GIUGNI
Via degl’Alfani.

DOORWAY OF PALAZZO GIUGNI.

Bartolomeo Ammannati built this palace for the rich merchant Simone da Firenzuola in 1577. He died soon afterwards, leaving a will forbidding his sons, or their heirs, “to dare, or to presume, either inter vivos, or by last will or testament for any reason whatever, to sell, give away or alienate, the said house.” In case his sons had no children the property was to go to the descendants of his brother Carlo, and failing them, to those of his daughter Virginia, married to Vincenzio Giugni. None of his sons had any children, so in 1640 the palace came into the possession of his Giugni grandchildren. The Giugni claimed descent from Junius Brutus, and were always Guelphs. The first Prior of fifty they gave to Florence was Ugolino, in 1291, and his descendant Bernardo, a man of great ability and consummate prudence, was the chosen spokesman when there was a popular tumult. Messer Galeotto Giugni, a staunch republican, was exiled, and together with his son, murdered at Rome by emissaries of Cosimo I. Vincenzio Giugni, husband of Virginia Firenzuola, became a Senator in 1600, a dignity also conferred on his son Niccolò, who married Cassandra, the last of the noble house of Bandini of Rome. The fine collection of ancient statues belonging to her uncle, Cardinal Ottavio Bandini, was brought to Florence and placed in the garden of the palace. Cinelli gives an account of them, as well as of the pictures in the gallery, in his Bellezze della Città di Firenze.

In 1830 the palace was sold to the Della Porta family, who still own it, and in 1871 it was admirably restored by the architect De Fabris, who scrupulously avoided adding to, or altering, the work of Ammannati. The coat-of-arms of the Firenzuola, a tiger girt with a golden girdle and holding a sickle in his right paw, is on the façade. In the latter half of the last century Palazzo Giugni was much frequented by English visitors to Florence, as Mr. Spence, a popular and well-known personage, inhabited the second floor during the winter.

PALAZZO GONDI
Piazza S. Firenze. No. 1.

The progenitor of the great family of the Gondi, whose descendants played an important part in French history, was a certain Bellincozzo, who owned a house and a tower in the XIIth century near Sta. Maria degl’Ughi, in Florence. One of his descendants, Forte, signed the peace with Genoa in 1201, and from his grandson Gondo the family took their name. Geri de’ Gondi lent money to the Republic of Florence, his name appearing as a large creditor in 1324, and a few years later that of his son Simone, who solemnly swore allegiance to the Guelph party in 1351. But seven years afterwards he was accused of intriguing in favour of the Ghibellines, and he and his descendants were declared incapable of holding office. This sentence was annulled in 1438 in favour of his grandson, Simone, who was elected Gonfalonier of Justice, and lent 8,000 golden florins to the State. His brother Leonardo sold the old family house and tower near Sta. Maria degl’Ughi to Palla Novello Strozzi in the XVth century, and in 1488 his son Giuliano began to build the fine palace in Piazza San Firenze; Giuliano da San Gallo, with whom he had made a close friendship at Naples, being his architect. He rendered such services to King Ferdinando of Naples that he offered him a large pension, but Gondi, being, as the Florentines say, “all of one piece,” refused, on the plea that no citizen of a free republic should accept money from a foreign potentate. So Ferdinando’s son, King Alfonso, bestowed on him the privilege of placing a ducal crown in his coat-of-arms. Giuliano was twice Gonfalonier of Justice, and died in 1501, before his magnificent palace was finished.

COURTYARD OF PALAZZO GONDI.

A cousin of his, Giovanbattista Gondi, went to Paris, became a naturalized French citizen and married a lady-in-waiting of Queen Catherine. Having no children he adopted his nephew Girolamo, a clever politician employed by the Queen and her sons after her in various delicate missions. He received Henri IV. and his bride on their entry into Paris in the fine Hôtel de Gondi built by him, but which his son Jean Baptiste was forced to sell. It was bought by the King, who gave it to the Prince de Condé. He also built a palace in Florence near Sta. Maria Maggiore, which was sold to the Orlandini. Another Gondi, Alberto, married the gouvernante of the royal children, widow of the Baron de Retz. A distinguished soldier he was in such favour at Court that he was sent by Charles IX. as his proxy to marry Elisabeth of Austria. In 1573 he became a Marshal of France, and some years later was one of the hundred noblemen of high birth who first received the Order of St. Esprit. In 1584 he was created Duc de Retz, and was in command of the troops when Henri IV. entered Paris. His eldest son Charles, Marquis de Belle-Isle, married the Princesse Antoinette d’Orleans, daughter of the Duc de Longueville and of the Princesse de Bourbon, and was killed before Mont St. Michel when only twenty-seven. Another son, Henri, in whose favour his uncle the Cardinal de Gondi retired, became Bishop of Paris. The youngest was the first Archbishop of Paris, and his nephew Jean François Paul, the famous Cardinal de Retz who joined the ranks of the Fronde after incurring the enmity of Mazarin, succeeded him. Imprisoned by order of the King in the castle of Nantes, he contrived to escape to Spain, and embarked on a galley lent to him by the King for Piombino. After passing some years in Rome he resigned his archbishopric, and was allowed to return to France in 1662, when the King made him Abbot of St. Denis, where he wrote his well-known memoirs.[39]

But to return to the stately palace in Florence which Giuliano de’ Gondi began in 1488, and by will charged his sons to finish. The courtyard and the balustrade of the staircase, decorated with delicate carvings of animals and foliage, are among the finest things San Gallo ever did. In the large room upstairs is a handsome wooden ceiling, and a beautiful fireplace with a frontone, or mantel-front, also by San Gallo, representing the triumph of Neptune, and two statues of Hercules and of Samson. “It is so richly carved and so varied in style, and so beautiful,” writes Vasari, “that naught like it had been seen before, nor one with so many figures.” The old Roman statue in the palace is mentioned in a letter from Giuliano da San Gallo’s son, Francesco, to the head of the hospital of the Innocenti. “My father told Michelangelo that the statue in the house of the Gondi represents a Consul, and was found when the foundations for the palace of the Guelph party were being dug, where once existed the baths. He carried it to the Gondi palace, which he was then building, with the intention of placing it at the corner in the Piazza. But this was not done, as the palace was not finished.”

The fountain in the courtyard was erected by the descendant and namesake of Giuliano de’ Gondi, and by special grace he was allowed by the Grand Duke Ferdinando I. to take water from the fountain in the Piazza della Signoria. When Florence became the capital of Italy the Via de’ Gondi was too narrow for the increased traffic, and a large portion of the old palace was taken off, but the southern façade was admirably rebuilt. The palace still belongs to the Gondi family.

PALAZZO GRIFFONI (NOW GATTAI-BUDINI)
Via de’ Servi. No. 57.

DOORWAY OF PALAZZO GRIFFONI.

About 1250 the Servites bought so much more land than was necessary for their church, convent and orchard, that a large space was left in front of the church. In winter the mud was knee deep, and in summer the faithful were enveloped in clouds of dust when they went to mass. So the friars petitioned the Captains of the Guelph party to make a paved road from the Via de’ Servi to the S.S. Annunziata. In 1464 the Prior of the Order decided to sell some of the waste land near the Via de’ Servi, and the first buyer was Puccio Pucci. He did not carry out the covenants of the sale, and the land was sold to Roberto de’ Ricci in 1515; some thirty years later his sons ceded their rights to the brothers Griffoni. Ugolino Griffoni, secretary to Ramazzotto, the confidential adviser of Cosimo I., held, among other rich benefices, that of Maestro dell’ Altopascio and had the title of Monsignore as an Apostolic Pronotary. He, like many of the Duke’s courtiers, called in Bartolomeo Ammannati as his architect, and the contract between them of 4th September 1563 still exists in the State archives.[40] Ten years later the marble coat-of-arms, which is now on the façade in the Piazza, was placed above the central window in Via de’ Servi. The balcony was one of the first works by Gian Bologna, but the palace was only entirely finished in 1772 by Pietro Griffoni.

Cinelli writes in the Bellezze della Città di Firenze, “This beautifully proportioned and ornate palace, with a fine frieze under windows of the Doric order, was built by Bernardo Buontalenti;” but he cannot have seen the above-mentioned contract, nor can Vasari have known of it, as he states that the architect was Giuliano di Baccio d’Agnolo. This is impossible, as Giuliano died two years before Ugolino Griffoni demolished the shops belonging to the first owner of the land. Additional proof that Ammannati was the architect of the fine palace, one of the few instances in Florence of an unplastered red brick building, exists in the Riccardiana library, in a book treating of arithmetic, geometry, etc., in which Ammannati made architectural sketches. Among them are a sketch of chimney-piece, the plan of a loggia, and some drawings of doors, all marked “for I’Altopasso.”

In 1800 Gaetano Griffoni sold his family palace to the Marquess Ferdinando Riccardi at whose death it went to his heir the Marquess Mannelli (who took the name of Riccardi). He sold it to the Antinori family in 1847. When, about forty years later, the palace was bought by Cav. Gattai and his son-in-law Signor Budini, but little remained of the beautiful friezes; the stone-work of the windows was crumbling away, and the cornice had not been completed. The palace has been admirably restored by the architect Boccini, who among other things did away with the shutters, which disfigured the façade and were destroying the fine ornamentation of the windows.

PALAZZO GUADAGNI
Piazza S. Spirito. No. 11.

This noble palace, with its arched windows and its beautiful loggia supported by fine columns, was built for Rinieri Dei towards the end of the XVth century by Cronaca, on the site of houses belonging to the ancient family of Bischieri. The lantern at the corner resembles those of the Strozzi palace, and is probably by the famous Niccolò Grosso, surnamed il Caparra.

The first of the Dei family to attain eminence in Florence were Giovanni di Deo, one of the twelve Buonomini in 1445, and his brother Domenico, ambassador to the Court of Naples. Miliano was a Prior in 1743, and his brother Benedetto went, amongst other places, as ambassador to Constantinople, where he stayed seven years and was so trusted by the Sultan that he despatched him on a mission to Damascus. He has left an interesting chronicle of contemporary events in Florence. The magnificent palace at the corner of the Piazza S. Spirito was let in 1568 by Rinieri’s son for two years to Don Garcia di Toledo, brother of Eleonora, wife of Cosimo I. Giovanni, last of the Dei family, died in 1683, and left his patrimony to the Buonomini di S. Martino, a confraternity which still exists and does much good among the poor who are ashamed to beg. They sold the palace the following year to Donato Guadagni.

PALAZZO GUADAGNI.

Progenitor of the Guadagni, according to Passerini,[41] was Guittone, son of Migliore of S. Martino di Lubaco, a village on the slopes of Monte Croce in the diocese of Fiesole. The Guadagni arms, a cross edged with thorns, confirms this, that particular spot being called Croce alla Spina. Ser Guadagno di Guitto, his descendant, must have attained a foremost position in Florence, as he was one of the three Priors of Guilds who, together with the Consuls, ruled the city in 1204, and his son Gianni was an Elder fifty years later. The Guadagni were Guelphs; and Gianni and his young son Pierotto fought at Montaperti in 1260, and were exiled with so many of the other great Florentine families. On the return of his party to power, Pierotto, who was one of the richest bankers in Florence, was twice elected Gonfalonier of Justice; but before his death in 1298 the bank failed, and his palace close to the Duomo, near the old Porta a Balla, was let to Antonio Orsi, the warlike Bishop of Florence.

The Guadagni seem to have been a hot-headed, quarrelsome race. Migliorozzo fought with distinction against Henry VII, and again at Montecatini and at Altopascio. In 1327 he attacked and wounded his cousin Gherardo, and then attempted to poison him and his wife. The latter died from the effects of the poisoned cakes, and Migliorozzo was fined and condemned to lose his right hand and his left foot, but was pardoned at the intercession of Gherardo. Lapo Guadagni was beheaded in 1344 for attempting to assassinate his cousin Filippo and killing a priest who defended him. In 1410 Antonio Guadagni also lost his head for trying to defraud the Commune of Florence by swearing that a certain Gaspero was the son of Francesco da Carrara, Lord of Padua, who had been strangled by the Venetians, to enable him to draw out money deposited by his supposed father in the Monte.

Bernardo Guadagni is well known as the man whose debts were paid by Rinaldo degl’Albizzi, in order that he might be elected Gonfalonier of Justice and sentence Cosimo de’ Medici to exile, who only escaped a worse fate by bribing the Gonfalonier. Antonio, his son, fought with distinction against both Visconti and Paolo Guinigi, Lord of Lucca, but the return of Cosimo in 1434 was fatal to all the adherents of the Albizzi. Declared a rebel for not taking up his residence in Barcelona, to which place he was exiled for ten years, Antonio was taken prisoner at Fermo in 1436 and beheaded. The curious thing is that twenty-two years later he was again condemned to death as a rebel, and the sentence had to be revoked as impossible of execution against a dead man. A cousin of his, Tommaso, born in Savoy and married to a Frenchwoman, made so large a fortune by trade that “riche comme Gadagne” became a proverbial saying in Lyons, where he built a magnificent hospital and a fine house in the street named after him. He left his money and many domains to his nephew and namesake, whose descendants became French citizens with French titles, Conte de Verdun, Baron de Beauregard, de Champeroux, etc.

Jacopo, a nephew of Tommaso, remained in Italy, and bowed his neck to the yoke of the Medici. He was made a Senator in 1561 by Cosimo I. and occupied himself, as did also his two sons, in adorning the Guadagni palace near the Duomo. His grandson, Pierantonio, began the splendid gallery, the library and the museum of antiquities, which became famous in the XVIIIth century and in the beginning of the XIXth, after his father had bought the splendid old palace of the Dei. Ortensia Guadagni married a nephew of Pope Leo XI. and after his death became lady-in-waiting to Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, whose education she had superintended. Created a Marchioness in her own right, an unheard-of thing in the Grand Duchy, she was invested with the feudal estate and castle of S. Leolino del Conte, with the obligation of furnishing sixty-nine soldiers to the State, and was allowed to leave her title to her brother Tommaso’s eldest heirs male. He it was who employed Gherardo Silvani to build the palace which afterwards passed into the possession of the Dukes of San Clemente (see p. 303), and his son Francesco was a patron of the arts and an intimate friend of Salvator Rosa. Alessandro, great-nephew of the Tommaso Guadagno who settled in France, assassinated Andrea Davanzati in 1566, and was condemned to death in contumaciam. After some years Catherine de’ Medici obtained his pardon from her uncle the Grand Duke Francesco I., and he returned to Florence, where he built, after the design of Gherardo Silvani, says Passerini, a fine palace on the site of the old houses of his family on the Piazza del Duomo, which now belongs to the Marchese Strozzi of Mantua. Baldinucci, however, only mentions the coat-of-arms on the palace as being the handiwork of Silvani. Marquess Neri Guadagni, who died in 1862, left an only daughter, married to Marchese Dufour Berte, whose son now owns the great palace in Piazza S. Spirito.

PALAZZO GUICCIARDINI
Via Guicciardini. No. 13.

This gloomy large palace was entirely rebuilt by Gherardo Silvani for the Guicciardini, “changing it from the old to the modern form and creating a fine staircase,” writes Baldinucci. It stands on the site of several houses belonging to the Benizzi, where S. Filippo Benizzi, General of the Servite Order, who out of humility declined the Papal tiara, was born in 1233.

The Guicciardini came from Poppiana in the Val di Pesa in the XIIth century, and at once took their place among the rich bankers of Florence. Forty-four of the family were Priors and sixteen became Gonfaloniers of Justice, among them Luigi, who was accused of lack of energy at the time of the Ciompi riots. By a whimsical coincidence the mob insisted on knighting him in the Piazza della Signoria, whilst his house was being plundered and burnt. His son Giovanni was Commissary of War with the army of the League in Lombardy and again at Lucca in 1430, when the defeat of the Florentine troops was attributed, not only to his want of prudence, but to his love of gold. He was tried and acquitted; and there is little doubt the accusation was false, promoted by Cosimo de’ Medici whom Luigi had always opposed. Piero Guicciardini on the contrary favoured the ambitious designs of Cosimo, and his son Luigi, when Podestà of Fermo in 1435, captured Antonio Guadagni, the great enemy of the Medici, and sent him to Florence, where he was beheaded. Some years later Francesco Sforza made Luigi Podestà of Milan. With the exception of the few months, during which he was at different epochs Gonfalonier of Justice, most of his life was spent out of Florence as ambassador to various Italian princes and towns. His brother Niccolò married the daughter of the famous condottiere Braccio di Fortebraccio, Lord of Perugia. He was one of the fifteen citizens elected to govern Florence after the death of Leo X. who were dismissed as too republican when Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici arrived in the city. Niccolò was in danger of losing his head after the capitulation of Florence, as he had been one of the most active of the Dieci di Guerra who conducted the defence. His son Braccio, taken prisoner at Montemurlo, was condemned to imprisonment for life in the fortress of Volterra.

The celebrated historian Francesco Guicciardini, nephew to Niccolò, was born in 1482. At twenty-three he was already so able a lawyer that the Signoria appointed him to read the Institutes in public; he then began to practise at the bar and his reputation for eloquence, acumen and gravity, obtained him the post of ambassador to Ferdinand the Catholic of Aragon, from whom his enemies say he accepted a bribe. “Certain it is,” writes Symonds, “that avarice was one of his besetting sins, and that from this time forward he preferred expediency to justice, and believed in the policy of supporting force by clever dissimulation.” In 1513 Leo X. came to Florence, and discerning the ability of Francesco Guicciardini appointed him Governor of Reggio and Modena, to which Parma was added in 1521. Two years later Clement VII. made him Viceroy of the Romagna, and in 1527 Lieutenant-General of the Papal army with supreme authority. This, Passerini declares, was the chief cause of the sack of Rome and the imprisonment of the Pope, the Duke of Urbino disdaining to take orders from a mere lawyer. In the same year he fruitlessly strove to uphold the Medicean cause in Florence, only incurring the hatred of his fellow-citizens and the bitter reproaches of the Pope, who accused him of want of energy. Retiring to his villa near Arcetri he began his famous History, but alarmed at the aspect of things in Florence, he fled to Rome in 1529 and was declared a rebel. Three years later he returned as one of the twelve magistrates who “reformed” the city according to the commands of Clement VII. and the Emperor, “when,” as Varchi tells us, “Messer Francesco Guicciardini was more cruel and more ferocious than the others” [in punishing and proscribing the anti-Palleschi citizens]. He was elected to the Senate of the Eighty, and undertook to defend the cause of the Duke Alessandro de’ Medici before Charles V. at Naples, “which he did with such ardour,” writes Bernardo Segni, “confuting the accusations one by one with such contempt ... that the exiles styled him Messer Cerrettieri.”[42] He won the cause and Alessandro returned to Florence as absolute ruler. After the murder of the Duke, Guicciardini thought that the young Cosimo would be easily led, and supported his candidature to the throne with all his might. But for once the astute lawyer had misjudged his man. Cosimo I. made him understand that his advice was not wanted and that he intended to be sole master in Florence, and Pitti writes: “when the Duke Cosimo dismissed him together with certain of his colleagues his rage was great.... Astonished and deeply hurt he retired to his villa of Sta. Margarita at Arcetri where, carried away by anger, he re-wrote much of his History to prove that he did not belong to the sect of the Palleschi; and where he could, he attempted to show that he was but an instrument of the Republic.”[43] He spent the last year of his life in writing his famous histories and died, aged 58, on 22nd May, 1540. Varchi says of him: “Messer Francesco, besides his noble birth, his riches and his academical degree, and besides having been Governor and Viceroy for the Pope, was highly esteemed and enjoyed a great reputation; not only for his knowledge, but for his great practical acquaintance with the affairs of the world and the actions of men. Of such he would discourse admirably, and his judgment was sound. But his conduct did not tally with his speech; being by nature proud and curt, he was swayed sometimes by ambition, but oftener by avarice, in a manner unbecoming to a well-bred and modest man.” For an analysis of Guicciardini’s masterly Istoria d’Italia and Opere Inedite, I cannot do better than refer my readers to J. A. Symonds’ brilliant pages in the first volume of his Renaissance in Italy. The actual representative of the family, Count Guicciardini, descends from a brother of the great historian and lives in the old palace in which he was born and brought up.

PALAZZO LARDEREL
Via Tornabuoni. No. 19.

DOORWAY OF PALAZZO LARDEREL.

The Giacomini were among the illustrious families in olden days in Florence, and their coat of arms is still to be seen on an angle of this beautiful little palace. Messer Gherardo Tebalducci, a prominent citizen in 1280, had several sons, one of whom, for some unknown reason, dropped the family name and adopted his own Christian name Giacomino as a surname, which often occurs in the lists of the Priors. Antonio Giacomini was a brave soldier who in 1498 saved Poppi from falling into the hands of Alviano, four years later he acted as Commissary-General of the forces in the war with Pisa and the following year he was sent with 500 men into the Romagna against the Venetians. In 1504 he again fought the Pisans, seized Ripafratta and other strong castles, and then marched against his old antagonist Alviano, who was advancing to the help of Pisa, and routed him at Campiglia. Jacopo Nardi tells us that notwithstanding such great services the Republic of Florence let her old servant die in extreme poverty.

The Giacomini were zealous upholders of freedom. Francesco, one of the Dieci di Guerra in 1529, was so violent in his hatred of the Medici, that he denounced Carlo Cocchi for saying that it would be better not to expose the city to the horrors of a siege and to capitulate at once, because after all she belonged to the Medici. This ill-considered speech cost Cocchi his life. Another of the Giacomini, taken prisoner at Montemurlo with Filippo Strozzi, was beheaded in the Bargello.

A branch of the family must however have been fortunate in trade, as Settimanni notes in his Diary, “on the 10th October, 1580, the beautiful house of the Giacomini at S. Michele degl’Antinori was begun.” It is curious that neither he nor any other contemporary writer gives the name of the architect of the “Palagetto degl’ Giacomini,” as the Florentines lovingly called the building they admired so much, but it is most probably the work of Giovanni Battista Dosio of San Gemignano. It remained in the possession of the family until the death of Lorenzo, last of the Giacomini, in 1764, who left it to his widow for life and then to the Michelozzi Boni. After passing through various hands the palace was bought in 1839 by Count F. de Larderel, a Frenchman who made a large fortune in borax at Volterra, and whose daughter Countess Mirafiore now owns it.

PALAZZO LEONETTI (NOW DE WITTE)
Lung’Arno Guicciardini. No. 1.

A love-story, ending in a happy marriage, is symbolized in the quaint ornamentation of the palace. Bernardo Vettori, surnamed “il Biondo” (the fair-haired) died, leaving his widow Ginevra with one daughter, heiress to a large fortune. Piero Salviati married the young widow and induced her to affiance little Maddalena to his own son by a former marriage, but before Maddalena was of marriageable age her intended husband was killed in battle. In summer, like most Florentines, the Salviati went to their villa which was near to one owned by young Lodovico Capponi. He fell passionately in love with the golden-haired Maddalena, and she with him. Her step-father opposed the marriage as he wanted to keep her fortune in his own family, and he had influence enough at court to induce Duke Cosimo I. to forbid it. In spite of her mother’s entreaties Maddalena was put into a convent and every effort was made to provoke her lover, whose fiery temper was well known, into committing some act of violence. Ginevra at last succeeded in interesting the Duchess Eleonora in her behalf, who asked Maddalena to stay at the Pitti palace for a few days. Instead of days she remained months and, by order of the Duke, Lodovico Capponi’s name was always mentioned with contempt and contumely, while Sigismondo de’ Rossi, a favourite of Cosimo, was lauded to the skies. Lodovico, thus separated from Maddalena, determined that at any rate he would see her from afar and took a house belonging to the Gianfigliazzi at Santa Trinita, from the windows of which he could see the court pass over the bridge. The Florentines took such interest in the lovers that a crowd always assembled to watch the stolen glances they exchanged.

The Duchess was touched by the unhappiness and constancy of Maddalena, and it is supposed that it was by her suggestion that one morning at daylight an old woman appeared at Capponi’s bedside and bade him go at once to the palace and fetch Maddalena, and to prepare everything for the marriage. “In twenty-four hours,” writes an old chronicler, “Lodovico, among other magnificent things, caused an artist to paint a splendid and large shield with his arms and those of Maddalena, surrounded with olive branches and the word OPTATA, a motto of his own invention much praised for its brevity and its meaning; she being a Vettori, and peace, symbolized by the olive, following on the victory gained by her after war.” The wedding was a gay one and the house not being large enough Piazza Santa Trinita was used as a ball-room. “Comfits fell thick as hail in spring, and wine flowed like water.” The triumph of true love was very popular among the nobles, who feared the Duke would interfere in other marriages had he succeeded in preventing this one.

The lovers went to live in the old Vettori palace and amused themselves by decorating it in charming and symbolical fashion. Above the two large windows was inscribed LODOVICUS CAPPONIUS, to show that he was now the master of the palace and of its mistress, while the olive with the word OPTATA served as a decoration to the capitals of the pilasters, which bore at their base the Capponi arms on one side, the Vettori on the other. The motto OPTATA and the olive branches appeared also on the ornamented frieze under the first-floor windows, while on the smaller windows, in lieu of the ornaments generally used, were the arms of the two families.[44]

The name of the architect is unknown, but Bernardo Buontalenti, a friend of Capponi’s, did other work for him, so he may have aided in carrying out this memorial of faithful love; although as Signor Iodico Del Badia remarks, nothing in the façade recalls his style.[45] In the large saloon there is a stone fire-place, decorated with the arms, the motto and the olive branches, and the whole room is finely frescoed by Bernardo Poccetti with episodes from the lives of the Capponi family. Lodovico died in 1614, and by the marriage of his grandson’s daughter, Cassandro Capponi, the palace went to the Riccardi who sold it in 1803. Since then it has changed hands several times, and the last owner, Count Leonetti, sold it to M. de Witte.

PALAZZO MANNELLI
Via de’ Bardi. No. 40.

The Mannelli lay claim to be descendants of the great Roman family of the Manlii. They certainly are among the most ancient families of Florence, and in old times were known as the Pontigiani, probably because having built the first wooden Ponte Vecchio they had the right to demand toll, and were the custodians of the bridge. They also bore the names of Piazzegiani and of Capo di Ponte, from living close to the Piazza of Sta. Felicita and on account of the position of their palace, and of their tower which abuts on the bridge and was built about the XIIth century.

Already a powerful family in 1173 when Mannello di Bellondino was created a knight of the Golden Spur for services rendered to his native city, they became yet stronger when his two sons Abate and Rinuccio attained the position of Elders of the Republic. They were Ghibellines, and intermarried with the great family of the Uberti. But several of Abate’s sons went over to the opposite faction, and to the valour of Messer Coppo was attributed the victory of the Guelphs at the battle of S. Jacopo in the Val di Serchio in 1256. He and his brother Mannelino fought against their cousins, sons of Rinuccio, at Montaperti, and had to fly from Florence with the other Guelph nobles. Six years later the Ghibellines were beaten, and when the “Peace of the Cardinal Latino” was proclaimed in 1280, members of the Mannelli family were found in both camps. Among the signatories of the peace was Lapo, son of Messer Coppo, who had fought gallantly at Campaldino and was knighted in 1292. He had many sons, all distinguished soldiers whose names figure in the long list of battles fought during the first half of the XIVth century. His grandson, Amaretto, was deputed to guard the Val d’Elsa against the Pisans. Amaretto declared himself a popolano in 1361, and assumed the name of Pontegiani; sixteen years later he was one of the Buonomini, but being “admonished” by the Captains of the Guelph party he joined in the Ciompi riots and was knighted by the mob in 1380. When the nobles returned to power he was exiled, and to while away time wrote a history of the world. By his wife, Maria Strozzi, he left two sons, Francesco and Raimondo; the elder, to whom the world owes a large debt of gratitude, was probably an ecclesiastic. An intimate friend of Boccaccio, he made a copy of the Decameron which would otherwise have been lost. Boccaccio left his own manuscript by will to Fra Martino of Signa for his life, and then to the monastery of S. Spirito in Florence. It is supposed to have perished either in the fire which destroyed the church in 1471, or more probably in Savonarola’s bonfire of “obscenities and vanities” in which so much that was beautiful and precious went into smoke and ashes. Boccaccio must often have been a guest in the Mannelli palace, and one regrets that his friend Francesco was not endowed with the pen of a Boswell, to have preserved for us the personality of Giovanni Boccaccio. Francesco Mannelli only finished his copy nine years after the death of his friend; it came into the possession of the Medici, but disappeared, and was fortunately discovered and bought by Messer Baccio Baldini, doctor to the Grand Duke Cosimo I. and librarian of the Laurentian library, where it now is. At the end of the manuscript is written: Qui finisce la decima e ultima Giornata del libro chiamato Decameron cognominato Principe Galeotto, Scripto per me Francesco d’Amaretto Mannelli di 13 d’Agosto 1384. Deo sit laus et gloria, in ecternum ad honorem egregi Simacu Spinis et beneplacitum, et mandatum.

TOWER OF THE MANNELLI.

Raimondo, his brother, was a sailor, and distinguished himself in an engagement against Spinola, admiral of the fleet of Filippo Visconti, who then held Genoa. The allied fleets of Venice and Florence met the enemy off Rapallo on the 27th August, 1431, but the wind was unfavourable and many of their ships found great difficulty in getting out of Porto Fino. Raimondo, seeing his friends hard pressed, urged on his crew with threats, ran down Spinola’s galley and took him and sixty of his men prisoners. He was shabbily treated by the Venetian admiral in command, who took, not only the honour and glory, but the prisoners and consequently their ransom, from him. Mannelli’s portrait is painted among other seafaring worthies on one of the ceilings in the Pitti palace. Messer Coppo’s posterity died out in the XVIIth century, and the present branch of the family descend from his brother Nerlo, whose son Chele was surnamed Gorget, from his uncomfortable habit of wearing that part of his armour by day and by night. He was a good soldier, and at San Casciano killed with his own hand the leader of a strong body of French troops sent by Henry VII. to raid the Florentine territory. Jacopo Mannelli took a prominent part in the revolt against the Duke of Athens, and was named custodian of the bridge of Sta. Trinita, but one of his descendants, Filippo, a canon of the cathedral, disgraced the name of Mannelli by revealing the deliberations of the Council of the Republic to the enemy. He died by the hand of another priest in 1536.

The old palace and the tower ran great risk of destruction, or at the least of alteration when Vasari made the corridor between the Pitti palace and the Uffizi. “In order to make the corridor straight,” writes Mellini, “it was necessary to pass through the house of the Mannelli by the Ponte Vecchio, at the end of the Via de’ Bardi; so he [Cosimo I.] sent for the owners of the said house and asked if they were courteously inclined to permit him to make the passage. On the plea that it would spoil their house they refused, and he then placed it as we now see on stone brackets, passing by a sharp turn round the outside of the house. But he bore them no rancour, saying that every one was master of his own.”[46] Two of the family, Jacopo and his son Ottavio, were made Senators in the XVIIIth century, and the family still own and inhabit the palace and the stern old tower which guards the Ponte Vecchio.

PALAZZO MARTELLI
Via della Forca. No. 8.

The Martelli descend from an ancient family who owned the castle of Stabbiello in the Val di Sieve, one of whom, Martello, came to Florence early in the XIVth century, and from him they took their name. From what Migliore writes, their houses were in Via degl’ Spadai (of the armourers), but as they became more numerous and powerful the name of the street was changed to Via de’ Martelli.[47] When the present palace was built, or by whom, is not known.

Ruberto de’ Martelli, a rich Florentine banker, was created a Count Palatine by the Emperor Paleologus in 1439; some years later Nicholas V. made him Depositary of the Apostolic Chamber, and in 1455 the Republic of Florence sent him to Rome to assist at the Conclave which elected Pope Calistus III. But his name is better known as the patron and friend of Donatello, whom he took into his house as a lad and brought up. “The Martelli have,” writes Vasari, in his life of Donatello, “many objects in marble and in bronze, amongst others a David three braccie high, and many other things, most liberally given by Donatello in attestation of the service and love he bore them; more especially a S. Giovanni, a statue in marble of three braccie high, all finished by him, a most rare piece, now in the house of the heirs of Ruberto Martelli, who made it an heirloom, ordering that it should never be pawned, sold, or given away.” Domenico, brother to Ruberto, was a friend of Cosimo the Elder, who employed him in many embassies, and in 1476 he was Gonfalonier of Justice, one of the nine the family gave to Florence, besides thirty Priors. His son Braccio was among the first of the adherents of the Medici to turn against them when Piero fled the city. He then became one of the Dieci di Guerra, in 1495 he was Commissary of the war against Siena, and later of the siege of Pisa. Pietro, his son, a munificent patron of men of letters, had a considerable reputation as a mathematician. His cousin Lodovico was a poet, whose tragedy Tullia is said to have been admired. If true, it only shows that people had more patience in those days, and were content to listen to speeches of intolerable length and tedium. He led the band of Florentine scholars who impugned the genuineness of Dante’s De Eloquio, found and published by Trissino. Another Lodovico was the hero of the duel with Giovanni Bandini, fought at Poggio Imperiale in the presence of the Prince of Orange in 1530, so minutely described by Varchi.[48] Lodovico died of his wounds, and his portrait was placed in the Uffizi gallery amongst other patriots, though patriotism had little to do with the duel, which was fought for love of Marietta de’ Ricci.

Camilla Martelli had the misfortune to attract the notice of the Grand Duke Cosimo I., who was induced by Pius V. to marry her in 1560, thus legitimating their daughter Virginia. He soon afterwards retired to the Villa di Castello, virtually abdicating in favour of his son Francesco, who inherited the cruelty and the vices of his father without his ability. The years Camilla spent at Castello with Cosimo can hardly have been happy, but after his death her life was a miserable one; shut up as a prisoner in a convent, out of which she only emerged for a few hours to assist at her daughter’s wedding with the Duke of Modena in 1586, she died, worn out with grief, four years later. Several of the Martelli entered the Church. Francesco became Patriarch of Jerusalem in 1698 and died a Cardinal, and Giuseppe was Archbishop of Florence in 1732. He belonged to the Academy of the Crusca, and was a great collector of books. The Martelli still live in the old family palace, and possess Donatello’s works.

PALAZZO MONALDI
Via Porta Rossa. No. 20.

The majestic tower of the Monaldi (which has been restored), with part of the old house attached, stands nearly opposite Palazzo Davanzati. I cannot do better than tell the history of the family, mentioned by Dante as among the oldest in Italy, in the words of Piero Monaldi, whose manuscript history has been kindly lent to me by one of his descendants. “Our family comes from the Monaldeschi of Orvieto, and took its origin from the Duke and Baron Monaldo, connected with the famous house of Anjou, who governed Tuscany for the Emperor Charlemagne. His descendants were lords of Orvieto and of many other places in the Tuscan land.... Civil discord between them and the Filippeschi drove Monaldo and his family to Florence; he settled in the parish of Porta Rossa, and built a tower of square hewn stone 430 braccie in height. In this spot they had so many houses that the street was called de’ Monaldi [now Via Monalda]. The houses extended from the Piazza di Sta. Trinita and Porta Rossa as far as the church of Sta. Maria Ughi, until in 1346, on the day of S. John the Baptist, they were nearly destroyed by a very great fire, with the loss of much property, and of the lives of some of the family, as is related by Giovanni Villani. They were at once rebuilt, for the said houses are mentioned in the first catasto of the citizens of Florence as belonging to the sons of Antonio di Guido, who was an ancestor of mine. I note that as Grandi of the city we had not much to do with the government, being in opposition to the people; so that when in 1378 the mob became masters, our family was admonished and condemned; Lipozzo di Mangieri, who was then Podestà of Terra Nuova, being exiled together with his sons. When the recall of the exiles was talked of in 1395, we were again admonished and banished, and some went to Pisa and became citizens of that city, where to this day their ancient monuments can be seen. Buonfiglio Monaldi, a saintly man, one of the seven founders of the Servite Order, was of our family; his brother Buonconte, a knight, captain of Arezzo in 1260, was chosen by Cardinal Latino as one of the guarantors of the universal peace between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines in 1280. Ugo, knight of the Golden Spur, was captain of the cavalry of the King of Hungary, and is mentioned by Verino in his second book, De Illustratione Urbis Florentie.

Gloria Folcorum Federicus et Impiger Ugo

Pannoni Regis Turmas ductavit equestres

Pluraque Turcarum caepit Castella Monaldus, etc.

His magnificent tomb in Sta. Maria Novella was destroyed when the church was enlarged, but the old stone of our vault can still be seen in the pavement, on which is inscribed: Hic jacet [sic] Ossa Nobilis Militis Ugonis de Monaldis equitis Florentini et eorum Descendentium.

“Piero, my grandfather, was captain under the lord Tommaso de’ Medici. Alessandro was captain in 1530, and took the city of Volterra. Another was Archbishop of Rieti, but at present there only remain Fra Francesco, a Cappucin, and Piero di Giovanni, writer of this notice, and of this family history. Our arms have a white peacock on a red field, emblem of the city of Orvieto, from whence we came. Some add a silver rose, given by the King of England to Giovanni Monaldi.”[49] The tower of the Monaldi now belongs to Signor Majolfi.

PALAZZO RAMIREZ DI MONTALVO
Borgo degl’Albizzi. No. 24.

In 1540 a page named Antonio Ramirez di Montalvo came from Spain in the train of the Cardinal Don Giovanni di Toledo, Bishop of Burgos and uncle to the Duchess Eleonora, wife of Cosimo I. de’ Medici. The Cardinal passed some weeks in Florence, and when obliged to proceed to Rome left the lad Antonio, who was ill, in the charge of the Duchess. She took him into her service, and the clever young Spaniard gained the good graces of the Duke, became tutor to the young Prince Francesco de’ Medici, and married Donna Giovanna di Ghevara, one of the ladies-in-waiting of the Duchess. In 1568 he bought a house with a tower and a garden, in Borgo degl’Albizzi, from Giovanni Bonafedi, and afterwards two or three smaller ones adjoining, and then built the palace we now see. By the Duke’s order the overseer of the works at the Duomo supplied him with the wood necessary for the roof, doors, windows, etc., and it appears that Cosimo also gave considerable sums towards the cost of building. With good reason, therefore, the grateful Spaniard placed his master’s arms, instead of his own, on the façade with the inscription: COSMOS;MAGN;FLOR;ET;SEN;D;II.

PALAZZO MONTALVO.

The palace is decorated in grafite, and on a line with the arms are the favourite emblems of the Duke, a capricorn, a tortoise with a sail and two crossed anchors. It has always been attributed to Bartolomeo Ammanati, though neither Baldinucci nor any other contemporary writers give the name of the architect. But as Ammanati was at that time (1566–1569) engaged in rebuilding the bridge of Sta. Trinita, and was Cosimo’s favourite architect (he built the courtyard of Palazzo Pitti), it is more than probable that he was also employed by his courtiers. When Cosimo I. instituted the order of S. Stefano Don Antonio Ramirez di Montalvo was one of the first knights created, and was given a rich Commenda in perpetuity. The name of his grand-daughter, Donna Leonora, is well-known in Florence as the foundress of the convent of Le Quiete, the great school where the daughters of the nobility are educated by nuns called the Signore della Quiete, all ladies of good birth who do not take solemn vows. The life of Donna Leonora, written in 1740, is curious reading. As a baby she reproved her nurse if she was idle, and as a girl she must have been a trial to her father confessor from her scruples and incessant fears that everything was a deadly sin. She had visions, during which Our Lord and the Virgin Mary talked with her; she predicted the restoration to health, or the death, of many people and performed many miraculous cures. A singular mixture of Spanish bigotry and Tuscan common-sense was Donna Leonora. Many of the rules she laid down for the teaching of the young ladies at Le Quiete would be considered admirable at the present day. “Let them be trained to order,” she writes, “and to cleanliness. Teach them to put away their clothes properly.... Let them not be lazy or negligent, but sprightly and diligent. They should know how to sweep and clean a room, how to make a bed, to take charge of the linen and woollen things, and of what pertains to the furniture of the house. They should learn how to nurse a sick person with care, according to the doctor’s orders, and how to prepare all kinds of milk dishes, cordials, candied fruit and sweet pastry. It would be well, too, that they should know how to sew and wash fine linen, such as is used in a sacristy. Not that they are to perform such fatiguing duties, save for exercise and their own pleasure; on the contrary, I desire that they should be served in seemly fashion, but so that in case of necessity they may be able to direct how things ought to be done, for that is most necessary for the good ruling of a household.”[50] After all these excellent, but rather commonplace, precepts, the bewildered reader is suddenly plunged into chapter after chapter of prophecies made, and miracles worked, by Donna Leonora; the miracles continued even after her death in 1659. She did, however, good work in founding the convent of the Signore della Quiete. Her brother, Don Antonio, died in 1581, and was succeeded by the eldest of his five sons. According to his friend Vasari, he drew well, and was a munificent patron of art. The last of the family, another Antonio, inherited the tastes of his ancestor. He was President of the Academy of Drawing in Florence, and Director of the Palatine gallery in Palazzo Pitti; it was under him that the gallery was first thrown open to the public on Sundays and half-holidays in 1833.

In 1739 the palace was let to Baron von Stosch, an antiquary, and a spy in the service of the English government to watch the doings of the Pretender. That delightful old gossip, Sir Horace Mann, notes in 1757, “Baron Stosch is dead at last.... His effects consist only in his Collection, which is very great, and worth a large sum. It is to be offered to the Emperor. He has appointed me and Abbé Buonacorsi his executors, and has left him a picture, and me a cameo, which I might have bought some years ago for six zecchins.” The palace still belongs to a collateral descendant of the old Spanish family, the Count Matteucci Montalvo.

PALAZZO MOZZI
Piazza Mozzi. No. 3.

When the second line of walls was built round Florence in 1173, the Oltrarno consisted of suburbs, and was chiefly inhabited by the poor. But early in the following century rich and powerful families began to build their houses and towers there, and among them were the Mozzi.

“Mozorum prisca paucide stirpe superunt

Area sola tenet nomen vicina fluente,”

writes Verino. In 1260 Jacopo di Cambio Mozzi was one of the leaders of the Florentine army, and after the defeat of the Guelphs the houses and towers of the Mozzi were sacked and destroyed, for which the city paid them an indemnity. They then built a palace on the same spot, where they received Pope Gregory X. and his whole court in magnificent fashion, when going to the Council of Lyons. All the prelates of distinction who passed through Florence were guests of the Mozzi, as they, together with the Spini, were bankers of the Pope, and farmers of the revenues of the Holy See. For that reason they had houses or correspondents all over the world.

The Pope arrived on the 18th June, 1273, with Charles of Anjou, King of Naples, and Baldwin of Flanders, who styled himself Emperor of Constantinople, “and, as the sojourn of Florence pleased them,” writes Villani, “because of the goodness of the water, the salubrity of the air and the comfort to be found in the city, they determined to spend the summer there. The Pope observing that so fine a city suffered by reason of the parties (for the Ghibellines were in exile), willed that they should return and make peace with the Guelphs, and it was done. On the 2nd July the said Pope, with his cardinals, King Charles, the Emperor Baldwin, all the barons and courtiers, and the Florentine people, collected in the dry bed of the Arno at the foot of the bridge of Rubaconte [now alle Grazie]; and the illustrious and great people took their places on huge scaffoldings of wood which had been erected. And there the Pope judged between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, under pain of excommunication to whomsoever did not obey. He caused the leaders of each party to kiss each other on the mouth and make peace, and give bail and hostages; and all the castles held by the Ghibellines were to be given into the hands of King Charles.” The peace was but short-lived, as the Ghibellines, warned of the evil intentions of the King towards them, left the city four days later.

Things in Florence went from bad to worse, so that Pope Nicholas III. was begged to send a legate to promote peace. Once more Palazzo Mozzi “became a second Rome,” for the Cardinal Fra Latino Frangipani was an honoured guest there in October 1278. His first task was to reconcile the Guelphs, who had fallen out among themselves, and then he made peace between them and the Ghibellines. The “Peace of Cardinal Latino” was signed, amid general rejoicing, in the Piazza Vecchia of Sta. Maria Novella in 1280.

In 1314 King Robert of Naples sent his brother Piero, Count of Gravina, with three hundred horsemen, at the urgent request of the Florentines, to help them against Uguccione della Fagiuola, whom the Pisans had taken into their pay. The young Count dismounted at Palazzo Mozzi in August, and Ammirato describes him as “prudent and discreet. He showed no sign of the pride and haughtiness of royalty in his dealing with the citizens, behaving courteously to all.... To these qualities were added the natural advantages of remarkable beauty both of face and person.” The Florentines were delighted with him, and his death at the battle of Montecatini the following year was sincerely mourned. Seven years later the old palace opened its doors to a very different guest. Walter de Brienne, Duke of Athens and Count of Lecce, who was to become the hated tyrant of Florence, stayed there for some time when he first arrived as Vicario of the Duke of Calabria.