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Updated: June 9, 2025
Here in the loggia that looks over the city the Platonic Academy often met, so that these very pillars must have heard the gentle voice of Marsilio Ficino, the witty speech of the young Lorenzo, the beautiful words of Pico della Mirandola, the laughter of Simonetta, the footsteps of Vanna Tornabuoni.
These words produced no effect upon Luca, whose mind was now quite made up; he had been induced to desert his party by new conditions and promises of alliance from Piero; for one of his nieces had been married to Giovanni Tornabuoni.
Perhaps she had gone to London, as my host of Stretton Street had asserted! One afternoon, while haunting the streets, I suddenly encountered Mrs. Cullerton walking in the Via Tornabuoni, and, raising my hat, stopped to speak. After a few seconds she recognized me, and I walked at her side chatting.
There was even a wretched-looking man, with a rope round his neck an escaped prisoner, I should think, who had run in for shelter a very wild-eyed old man: I saw him with great tears rolling down his cheeks, as he looked and listened quite eagerly." There was a slight pause before Tito spoke. "I saw the man," he said, "the prisoner. I was outside the Duomo with Lorenzo Tornabuoni when he ran in.
The first sound Tito heard was the short laugh of Piero di Cosimo, who stood close by him and was the only person that could see his face. "Ha, ha! I know what a ghost should be now." "This is another escaped prisoner," said Lorenzo Tornabuoni. "Who is he, I wonder?" "Some madman, surely," said Tito.
"Why, let us go to Giacosa's too," said Colville, taking the ice. "We shall be the only foreigners there, and we shall not even feel ourselves foreign. It's astonishing how the hot weather has dispersed the tourists. I didn't see a Baedeker on the whole way up here, and I walked down Via Tornabuoni across through Porta Rosso and the Piazza della Signoria and the Uffizzi.
The remaining frescoes are of less interest and much damaged; but in the window wall one should notice the portraits of Giovanni Tornabuoni and Francesca di Luca Pitti, his wife, kneeling, because this Giovanni was the donor of the frescoes, and his sister Lucrezia was the wife of Piero de' Medici and therefore the mother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, while Francesca Tornabuoni, the poor lady who died in childbirth, was the daughter of that proud Florentine who began the Pitti palace but ended his life in disgrace.
The sunny streets looked sunnier than ever; the Tornabuoni was as usual lively and bustling; the flower market at the base of the Palazza Strozzi was gay with pinks and carnations and early roses.
There is one expensive high-class house, in the Via Tornabuoni Doney e Nipoti or Doney et Neveux where the cooking is Franco-Italian, and the Chianti and wines are dear beyond belief, and the venerable waiters move with a deliberation which can drive a hungry man and one is always hungry in this fine Tuscan air to despair.
On the opposite side of the picture is the fated Lorenzo Tornabuoni, of whom I have spoken above, the figure farthest from the edge, with his hand on his hip. The companion picture is the most popular of all the Birth of the Virgin certainly one of the most charming interiors in Florence.
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