You're back on the great square now, in front of a blunt stone fortress with a tall off-center tower stabbing up from one corner. This is the Palazzo Vecchio, and for centuries before the Medici got their hands on it, this building was the beating heart of something they were not part of at all — the Florentine Republic.
This is where the Republic governed itself, and it did it with a rule that tells you how much this city feared exactly the kind of power the Medici were quietly building. The elected officials who ran Florence, the priors, were not allowed to go home during their term. For two months they lived locked inside this palace, sealed off from their own families, so that nobody could visit them by night with a bribe, a threat, or a quiet suggestion about how the vote should go. The government was walled up in a tower to keep it honest. That was the Republic's whole anxiety in one arrangement — power must never get comfortable, never get private, never get inherited.
And the
n it got all three at once.
His name was Cosimo the First. Not the old banker — a later Medici, from a side branch, seventeen years old when a knife took the previous duke out of the picture and the city's grandees handed the boy the job. They assumed a teenager would be easy to steer. He crushed the men who'd installed him, made himself Duke and then Grand Duke of Tuscany, and then, around fifte
