of the city, and to his own convenience. The palace which we see to-day
at the corner of Via Cavour and Via Gori and call Palazzo Riccardi, was
perhaps not begun till 1444, and is certainly somewhat changed and
enlarged since Michelozzo built it for Cosimo Vecchio. The windows on
the ground floor, for instance, were added by Michelangelo and the
Riccardi family, whose name it now bears, and who bought it in 1695 from
Ferdinando II, enlarged it in 1715.

In 1417, Cosimo, after his marriage with Contessina de' Bardi, had
bought and Michelozzo had rebuilt for him the Villa Careggi, where, in
the Albizzi conspiracy, he had retired, he said, "to escape from the
contests and divisions in the city." It was here that he lay dying when
he wrote to Marsilio Ficino to come to him. "Come to us, Marsilio, as
soon as you are able. Bring with you your translation of Plato _De Summo
Bono_, for I desire nothing so much as to learn the road to the greatest
happiness": and there too Lorenzo his grandson turned his face to the
wall, when Savonarola came to him in his last hours and bade him give
back liberty to Florence.

It is, however, the palace in the Via Larga that recalls to us most
vividly the lives and times of these first Medici, Cosimo Vecchio, Piero
the gouty, Lorenzo il Magnifico. Michelozzo, Vasari tells us, deserves
infinite credit for this building, since it was the first palace built
in Florence after modern rules in which the rooms were arranged with a
view to convenience and beauty. "The cellars are excavated," he
explains, "to more than half their depth under the ground, having four
braccia beneath the earth, that is with three above, on account of the
lights. There are, besides buttresses, store-rooms, etc., on the same
level. In the first or ground floor are two court-yards with magnificent
loggia, on which open various saloons, bed-chambers, ante-rooms,
writing-rooms, offices, baths, kitchens, and reservoirs, with staircases
both for private and public use, all most conveniently arranged. In the
upper floors are dwellings and apartments for a family, with all those
conveniences proper, not only to that of a private citizen, as Cosimo
then was, but sufficient also for the most powerful and magnificient
sovereign. Accordingly, in our time, kings, emperors, popes, and
whatever of most illustrious Europe can boast in the way of princes,
have been most commodiously lodged in this palace, to the infinite
credit of the mag