A Florentine Diary

THE LIBRARIES A FLORENTINE DIARY A nderson SAVONAROLA From the portrait by Fra Bartolomeo. A FLORENTINE DIARY FROM 1450 TO 1516 BY LUCA LANDUCCI CONTINUED BY AN ANONYMOUS WRITER TILL 1542 WITH NOTES BY IODOCO DEL B A D I A 0^ TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY ALICE DE ROSEN JERVIS & PUBLISHED IN LONDON IN 1927 By J. M. DENT & SONS LTD. •8 *« AND IN NEW YORK BY « « E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE ALTHOUGH Del Badia's ample and learned notes are sufficient for an Italian, it seemed to me that many allu sions might be puzzling to an English reader, especially to one who did not know Florence well; therefore I have added short notes on city-gates, churches and other buildings which now no longer exist; on some of the festivals and customs; on those streets which have changed their nomenclature since Landucci's, day; and also on the old money. His old-fashioned spelling of names and places has been retained (amongst other peculiarities the Florentine was in the habit of replacing an I by an r) ; also the old calendar; and the old Florentine method of reckoning the hours of the day (see notes to 12 January, 1465, and to 27 April, 1468). As for the changes in the Government, they were so frequent and so complex, that it is necessary to have recourse to a consecutive history in order to under stand them. A. DE R. J. Florence 1926. The books to which I am indebted are as follows: Storia della Repubblica di Firenze (2 vols.), Gino Capponi. Firenze, 1875; Pianta geometrica della citta di Firenze, F. Fantozzi (out of print), Firenze, 1843; Notizie storici sulle Chiese di Firenze (10 vols.), G. Richa, Firenze, 1758; Studi storici sul centra di Firenze, Carocci ed altri, Firenze, 1889; Firenze scomparsa: ricordi storici e artistici, Carocci (out of print), Firenze, 1897; Firenze vecchia, G. Conti (out of print), Firenze, 1899; Storia della moneta della Repubblica florentina, Orsini (out of print), Firenze, Viviani, 1760; Vite de' piu eccellenti Pittori, Scultori, e Architetti, G. Vasari, Firenze, Le Monnier, 1852. v PREFACE IN searching for and collecting notices and reminiscences of the buildings in the city of Florence and old Florentine customs, the Diary of Luca Landucci can certainly not be neglected by anyone who has lately seen modern scholars discover and bring to light curious, unknown and interest ing notices, only made use of at times by past generations. No sooner had I advanced some way in reading this book, than I perceived that I had in my hands not a confused mixture, from which one could extract and prize a few individual recollections, but a true and exact chronicle, most varied and minute. Varied, indeed, inasmuch as the writer, whilst giving us notices of many domestic facts, of political events, of fetes, of those men of his day who excelled in any art, of any extraordinary phenomena, and of the magnificent buildings which were then being erected, represents to us vividly the public and private life of the second half of the fifteenth century, and of the first and most splendid years of the sixteenth century. Most minute also, because the facts, especially the political ones are generally noted day by day, and not all at once as, often to the detriment of lucidity, they are registered by his torians. I found, in fact, a book which, when confronted with others of the same kind and of the same date, much resembles the so-called Storie of Giovanni Cambi, for the unsuitable publication of which I ask myself whether the Carmelite friar, Father Ildefonso di San Luigi, has been pardoned even in the other world. Landucci is much pleasanter reading, inasmuch as he does not, like Cambi, intermingle the narration of facts with the registration of the names of the Gonfalieri and Priori who were appointed every half-year; a series of magistrates which one can reconstruct more authentically from so many sources. With the recollection of having read in Macchiavelli that, "if there is anything which pleases and instructs us in history, it is that which viiis described in detail," I set viii A FLORENTINE DIARY about publishing this Diary, being persuaded that even in our day the sentence of the Florentine secretary on the earnest words pronounced by Niccol6 Tommaseo in the Archivo Storico Italiano, holds good, as to the necessity of publishing, with proper care, the records of past ages which still remain unedited, and the historical documents buried in public and private collections in Italy. That the work of Landucci is worthy of esteem is proved by the fact that it was held in account in the past also; as is indisputable when we see that the well-known Diary of Agostino Lapini, for almost all the first half of the sixteenth century, is nothing but a remodelling of Landucci; Vincenzio Borghini made an extract of it which was in cluded in the Naniana of Venice; in the Spogli of the Senator Carlo Strozzi, a well-known Florentine scholar, many fragments are quoted; Giovambatista Casotti made no little use of it in his Memorie istoriche della miracolosa immagine di M.V. dell' Impmneta, which he dedicated to the Grand Duke Cosimo III. in 1712. And in the same work it is attested how greatly this Diary was prized by scholars when we read that it was going round being copied, which means, in my opinion, that copies of it were in great request. A considerable part of it is also transcribed in a codex of last century, belonging to the Florentine Archives of State, in which are collected many records of Florentine history taken from writers who for the most part lived in the sixteenth century. A copy was possessed by Domenico Manni, and he often quotes from it in his pamphlets. Pietro Fanfani, who had good taste in publishing ancient writings, printed, under the title of Savonaroliana, almost all that part of the book in which the vicissitudes of the celebrated Dominican are narrated; and was also desirous of publishing the description of the magnificent fetes held in Florence at the time of the visit of Pope Leo X. I have been unable to discover the fate of the codexes of this Diary, which, according to Casotti, must have been several in number, a fact that is confirmed by Moreni in his Bibliografia Toscana; the autograph one is still pre served in the Biblioteca communale of Siena, and is written on a parchment which originally consisted of eighty-eight numbered pages. In the autograph, however, the complete diarto 72y arnoe wantinglonger exists; the, page as pags ofe thi17s an coded thx ehav pagee latels froy mbee 3n2 PREFACE IX renumbered, and reach the number 89, whilst in reality there are go, as by an error two pages were numbered 61 ; and the pages from 75 onwards are blank. In spite of all my researches, there was no way of filling up the gaps in the autograph but by making use of a codex in the Maruccelliana at Florence; a copy badly written, but sufficiently exact, which dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century. As the documents and writings relating to the political history of the Italian States up till the fall of the Florentine Republic are so very numerous, I considered it unnecessary to make any notes on those parts of the Diary which concern this history; especially as the writer describes these events at sufficient length, as for instance when he discusses the conspiracy of the Pazzi and its results, the acts of Lorenzo de' Medici, of Carlo VIII., of Alessandro VI., and of Valentino, the details of the war with Pisa, and so on. For this part, as I say, I have limited myself to giving a few explanations which may serve to elucidate the text, especially for those who do not possess detailed knowledge of Florentine history four centuries ago. Where I have made a point of giving ample notes is in the case of those records relative to matters concerning the city of Florence and its customs: and in this I have preferably had recourse to documents in the archives, to contemporary writers edited or unedited, and to monographs published at various times on special subjects. It now remains to say something about the author, of whom no one, so far as I am aware, has given any details. We find many particulars relating to the life of himself and his family in the Diary; others we obtain from the declarations for the Catasti and the Decime (taxes), which confirm me in the belief that he was son of an Antonio, son of Luca di Landuccio, a Florentine citizen, described in the gonfalone (the division under one banner) of the ChiaviJ of the quarter of S. Giovanni, inhabiting the parish of S. Pier Maggiore. This Antonio, a native of the manor of Dicomano, was not without fortune, especially if we take into account the possessions of his mother Felice. In 1469 he was seventy-five years of age, and Agnola his wife 1 Chiave (key): the city was formerly divided into Sesii (sixths), and the arms of the Sesto of Porta San Hero were yellow keys, on a field red above and white below. [Trans.] X A FLORENTINE DIARY seventy-two; they had two sons: our Luca, and Gostanzo, six years younger than Luca: that Gostanzo, enthusiastic for Barbary-horses, who went to procure them in the Levant, and who, after having won twenty races, came in 1485 to the miserable end described in these pages.

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