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Updated: June 14, 2025
On Easter morning, they lay in wait for the handsome but heedless young Buondelmonte at the north end of the Ponte Vecchio; and when he appeared, boldly riding without an escort, all clothed in white and upon a milk-white steed, they fell upon him and struck him to the ground, and left him dying there, his Easter tunic dripping with his blood.
There could be no better foundation for romance or drama than the famous Buondelmonte marriage, before which, sings Dante, Florence had never cause to shed a tear, and after which the white lily of her escutcheon was dyed red in her heart's blood. There were four noble families in Florence, of surpassing importance, the Buondelmonti, the Uberti, the Donati, and the Amidei.
He differs from the concurrent testimony of other historians in making the affianced bride of Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti a Giantruffetti instead of an Amidei, and the Bishop of Arezzo a Pazzi instead of an Ubertini. He reckons the Arti at twenty-four, whereas they numbered twenty-one. He places the Coronation of Henry VII. in August, instead of in June, 1312.
The story which lies at the opening of the great feud between Guelph and Ghibelline in Florence throws a picturesque light on the temper of its nobility. Buondelmonte, the betrothed lover of a daughter of Oderigo Giantrufetti, passes beneath a palace of the Donati at whose window stands Madonna Aldruda with her two fair daughters.
Cardinal Tournon took him under his patronage, and he painted a large number of works in the style of Andrea. JACOPO, called JACONE, was another of Andrea's favourite disciples. His frescoes, of which some existed till of late years on the facade of the Palazzo Buondelmonte, in Florence, were much in Del Sarto's manner.
He also told his name. "Gino Buondelmonte, at your service," replied the knight, naming himself. "Nay, sir," laughed Gilbert, "a knight cannot serve a simple squire!" "It is never shame for gentle-born to serve gentle-born," answered the other.
"Ah, this happened some centuries before the Buondelmonte you've been bored with was born. This was Giovanni Gualberto of the Buondelmonti, and he was riding along one day in 1003, near the Church of San Miniato, when he met a certain man named Ugo, who had killed one of his brothers.
Thus far Villani: to-day S. Miniato, the church, and the great palace built in 1234 by Andrea Mozzi, Bishop of Florence, come to us with memories, not of S. Miniato alone, that somewhat shadowy martyr of so long ago, but of S. Giovanni Gualberto also, of the Benedictines too, and of the Olivetans, of the siege of 1529, when Michelangelo fortified the place in defence of Florence, saving the tower from destruction, as it is said, by swathing it in mattresses; of Cosimo I, who from here held the city in leash. It is the most beautiful of the Tuscan-Romanesque churches left to us in Florence; built in 1013 in the form of a basilica, with a great nave and two aisles, the choir being raised high above the rest of the church on twenty-eight beautiful red ancient pillars, over a crypt where, under the altar, S. Miniato sleeps through the centuries. The fading frescoes of the aisles, the splendour and quiet of this great and beautiful church that has guarded Florence almost from the beginning, that has seen Buondelmonte die at the foot of the Statue of Mars, that has heard the voice of Dante and watched the flight of Corso Donati, have a peculiar fascination, almost ghostly in their strangeness, beyond anything else to be found in the city. And if for the most part the church is so ancient as to rival the Baptistery itself, the Renaissance has left there more than one beautiful thing. For between the two flights of steps that lead out of the nave into the choir, Michelozzo built in 1448, for Piero de' Medici a chapel to hold the crucifix, now in S. Trinit
Short was the strife and sharp, as the Florentines spread to right and left of their leader and pressed the foe back against the steep hill in the narrow meadow. Then Buondelmonte thrust out straight and sure, in the Italian fashion, and once the mortal wound was in the face, and once in the throat, and many times men felt it in their breasts through mail and gambison and bone.
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