Via de' Tornabuoni: The Medici In-Laws

Why is it significant?

You are on Via de' Tornabuoni, the most elegant street in Florence: wide paving, stone palaces, and the shop windows of fashion houses where merchants' storerooms used to be. Its name belongs to a family, and that family belongs to the Medici story.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You are on Via de' Tornabuoni, the most elegant street in Florence: wide paving, stone palaces, and the shop windows of fashion houses where merchants' storerooms used to be. Its name belongs to a family, and that family belongs to the Medici story.

The Tornabuoni were an old Florentine house with palaces along this street. In 1444 Lucrezia Tornabuoni married Piero de' Medici, Cosimo's son, and became the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent. She was far more than a bride: she wrote religious poems, managed property, and acted as a political adviser to her husband and later her son, one of the most influential women of fifteenth-century Florence. When it was time to find a wife for Lorenzo, she travelled to Rome to inspect the candidate, Clarice Orsini, and wrote home describing the girl in frank detail.

Her brother Giovanni Tornabuoni ran the Medici bank in Rome and paid for the chapel by Ghirlandaio you saw in Santa Maria Novella. In 1486 his son Lorenzo Tornabuoni married Giovanna degli Albizzi, and the wedding was celebrated in style: Botticelli painted frescoes for the family's villa outside the city, and Ghirlandaio painted Giovanna's portrait, a serene profile that now hangs in Madrid.

Then came the fall. Giovanna died in childbirth only two years after the wedding. And in 1497, with the Medici in exile and Savonarola's influence at its height, Lorenzo Tornabuoni was beheaded for plotting to bring his cousin Piero de' Medici back to power. Being a Medici in-law was a career, until it became a death sentence.

The street went on living. Grand Tour travellers strolled here, and Procacci, a little shop opened in 1885, still serves its famous truffle sandwiches to Florentines in their best coats. Now walk south, and on your left you cannot miss it: the biggest private palace in Florence, built by the Medici's oldest enemies.