The example of the Court was felt in every grade of life: marital unfaithfulness, personal spleen, and family feuds divided every household. The worst of human passions ran riot, and life became a pandemonium, wherein the sharp poignard, the poison phial, and the strangling rope, played their part at the dastardly will of their owners.
Fair Florence was still—as she will ever be—“The City of the Lily”; but the blue and silver emblematic giglio—the modestly unfolding fragrant iris of the unsophisticated countryside, drooped before the flaming, passionate tiger-lily of the formal garden of debauchery, with its pungent odour and its secretive, incurled scarlet petals—splashed with the blacks and yellows of crime and greed!
“Nature ever
Finding discordant fortune, like all seed
Out of its proper climate, thrives but ill:
But were the world content to work,
And work on the foundation Nature lays,
It would not lack of excellence.” ...
IL PARADISO, Canto viii.
A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anecdota Letteraria. 4 vols. Florence. 1773.
Bocchi, F., Le Bellezze della Citta di Firenze. Florence. 1591.
Corsini, B., Lorenzino de’ Medici. Florence. 1890.
Cronacci, F., Lorenzo de’ Medici. Florence. 1760.