That blocky stone fortress with the tall off-center tower is the Palazzo Vecchio, the Old Palace, the seat of Florence's government for seven hundred years. Look up at the row of windows facing the square. Those windows are where the story that started in the cathedral came to its brutal end — because when the plot to murder the Medici brothers failed, the revenge happened right here, and it happened within hours.
While Giuliano was being stabbed to death at Mass, a second team of conspirators — led by the Archbishop of Pisa, Salviati — tried to seize this palace and take control of the government. It went catastrophically wrong. They got lost in the maze of rooms, some got locked in by the palace's own trick doors, and the officials inside rallied and captured them. And a wounded Lorenzo, who had just watched his brother butchered, was in no mood for trials.
So they hanged the conspirators out of these windows, in full view of the whole square, one after another. Including the Archb
ishop of Pisa — a prince of the Church, still wearing his religious robes, swinging from the front of the town hall. There is a detail so grotesque it feels invented, but the chroniclers all recorded it: as the archbishop dropped and convulsed, he was said to have clamped his teeth into the body of Francesco de' Pazzi, hanging in the throes right beside him.
The head of the Pazzi family, old Jaco
