The palace of the returned exile

This block of rough stone is the work of Filippo Strozzi, a member of a family the Medici had banished and who built a fortune in Naples before he was allowed to return to Florence. For his palace he bought up and demolished something like fifteen houses.

He knew exactly how touchy all of this was, so while he had the largest private home in the city drawn up, he let it be known that he was building something modest, and he asked Lorenzo de' Medici for advice. The first stone went into the ground at an hour an astrologer had worked out.

Strozzi died two years after the start and the building stayed unfinished, which you can see along the top edge: on the front the heavy cornice runs neatly all the way, and halfway along the side it simply stops.

We walk one street further west, where among the ordinary facades there stands a palace with a crisp grid of pilasters.