_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.