"Florence - City of the Mad Medicis " a Florence Travel Page by JohnnySpangles

Florence owes much of its art and architectural legacies to the foibles of the Medici clan. These were a bunch of wealthy, and often loony, bankers that dominated the political life of Florence from the twelfth century onwards.

By the fifteenth century, after all that banking, they’d managed to save up quite a few lire. The main man back then was Cosimo Medici and it was he who really got things going in Florence. Not just a man to sit in his counting house counting out his money he decided he wanted to be King Cosimo, so he set about despatching all his political opponents at the end of a sharp sword. He rose to the top of the tree and established the Medici fortune as the biggest in Italy. Despite being a raving fascist in the early days he was a great patron of the arts and actually set up a reasonably democratic system of government. However the problem with the Medicis was a genetic glitch that meant the smart genes leapfrogged generations. Cosimo’s son was a bit of a wet fish, and didn‘t really have the stomach for the tricks his father got up to, so the story only gets exciting again when his grandsons turned up. These were Giuliano and Lorenzo The Magnificent.

Giuliano got himself murdered fairly early on and Lorenzo became the top dog in Florence. Your average Italian goes all misty-eyed at the mention of Lorenzo as he was a bit of a one-off. He expanded Florence dramatically and sponsored such artists as Botticelli and Verrochio, the latter being the teacher of Leonardo. It wasn’t until Mussolini turned up and got the trains running on time that Lorenzo’s achievements were even closely matched.

When Lorenzo died he was replaced by Piero de Lorenzo. Piero was a bit of an arse and managed to bugger up three centuries worth of Medici plotting and conniving by getting himself expelled from Florence. He made the unwise move of letting the French army in through the tradesman’s entrance, which didn’t go down too well with the locals when they started raping and pillaging. As you can see this genetic quirk of good Medici, bad Medici, had reared its ugly head again. The Medicis were restored to power but the jumping genes kept letting them down. Things finally came to a head when all this twisted Medici DNA produced Gian Gastone de’Medici in 1671. There had been an unbroken line of male Medicis since Cosimo but Gian Gastone didn’t fancy the bloated wife that had been arranged for him and much preferred the pleasures of young boys. Consequently an heir was never produced and the Medici line finished with him.

Despite all their failings they were good enough to leave their buildings and artworks to the City of Florence. The Uffizi was built by the Medicis, and most of the artworks in it were owned by them at some stage. I’m not sure if they had anything to do with the bridge across the river, the Ponte Vecchio, but a word of warning, don’t go there with your girlfriend. This is because it is lined with nothing but jeweller’s shops and by the time you get to the other side of the river she’ll probably be your wife.