The first time Don Giovanni mentioned Livia Vernazza to his family was in the account of a street brawl that nearly ended in homicide.

He had been entertaining some friends at the palazzo in Parione, along the Arno River on the western edge of Florence, late one night in early July, 1611. The weather was hot; the guests were restless. Geography and climatology supply what the document does not. Evening breezes would have been seeping in while the river gurgled past the south window, bearing various trade-related discharges. The advancing stench from the rotting animal carcasses in the city dump...

As he prepared for the transfer to Venice, Giovanni may have wondered why being a Medici was such hard work.

Perhaps he thought about his childhood, and how he became a Medici in the first place. Since he never recorded his early experiences, we have to rely on accounts by family friends or associates to understand the facts at his disposal when he reflected upon his life. For instance, there was the bathing lesson described in the obituary by his close friend Giovan Battista Strozzi. Giovanni, so the story goes, had been watching on shore as Cosimo I and Francesco,...

She was at the window’s edge when they caught her and pulled her back. Another second and she would have been gone. Perhaps the shutters wide open and the oilcloth rolled up had looked like an invitation. The testimony by a neighbor who claimed to have witnessed the scene and “stopped her before she went” does not reveal her state of mind.¹ Did she think long and hard about suicide, or was it a moment’s decision? Did she imagine what would happen next, such as her head splitting like a melon with a soft thunk on the piazza in front...

The descriptions in Giovanni’s correspondence with Livia have an air of authenticity. Making allowance for some exaggeration, what he tells about his life as a warrior and their life together as lovers somehow rings true. Love and war, in his account, are inseparably intertwined. As he slogged through another field of Friulian mud, forded another stream, held vigil in a cold tent till the morning of another battle, as the pains from years of soldiering seeped in and out of his consciousness like the water soaking every stitch of clothing, as the thrill wore off and the campaign wore on,...

The War of Friuli was still going full blast when Livia discovered the betrayal. Her understanding of what was going on may have occurred in stages. At first there would have been disbelief. Then she would have wondered whether Giovanni’s many declarations of fidelity were just repetitions of what he was saying to someone else. She often said that she took his words to heart; perhaps she even mouthed them as any new reader might: “my eternal love,” “your obedient slave.” Saying them over and over to herself perhaps made them more real to her; now they would only remind...

The inventories, the probate records, and the correspondence with builders and agents all suggest the framing of a certain kind of life. On a typical evening, a soft tap at the new oak portal and Livia’s butler, Antonio Ceccherelli, would let Giovanni in. Maybe she would be waiting in the hall by the sculpted mantelpiece where her name was set in stone, a none too subtle reminder to their acquaintances that this was her domain.¹ A few words, perhaps a quick embrace, and they would pass through to the garden in the back. This feature, apart from the location across...

Livia had hardly gazed into the void of widowhood, and the Medici agents were already barking orders around the palace in Murano. She could stand it no longer. Feverish, eight months pregnant, and exhausted from the last painful days of Giovanni’s illness, she finally gave in. At midnight on July 23, 1621, she climbed aboard the boat for the trip down the coast to where land transportation would take her to Florence, never to return. She did not go alone with her butler and the boatman; at least on this much, she had her way. Joining her were her chambermaids,...

Twelve years of “strict confinement” in the Belvedere Fortress took their toll on Livia, also because of the quality and location of the single room.¹ There were apartments in the central villa of the fortress fit to house the grand ducal family, which would actually transfer to this location temporarily during the worst days of the plague of 1630, far away from the contagion raging in the streets of Florence. Considering that Livia lived in the fortress when the grand ducal party arrived, she could not have been lodged anywhere near these spaces.² Nor would she have shared the secret...

Baroncelli was no doubt aware of the sound of his own name. “Little barons” it seemed to say—a whiff of ancient aristocracy, perhaps as befitted his family’s pretensions. When he visited the Grand Duchess Maria Maddalena at the villa of Poggio Imperiale with his son Tommaso, perhaps he liked to remember that the huge construction, recently redone and redubbed “imperial” in honor of her brother, Emperor Ferdinand II, was built around a villa once belonging to the Baroncelli family.¹ In time, the family slid so far from its glory days that its members—including himself—had to look for...

Back on the terrace in Santa Croce after the long walk home from Livia’s last dwelling in via Casamorata, we sat in silence as darkness fell. And then:

“Is it the end of romance?”

“You mean, the end of the book?” I ask.

“You’re not answering.”

“I wonder what Livia would think.”

“You’re always bringing her up.”

“She has her rights.”

“How so?”

“I just wrote a book about her. Would she approve?”

“You’re the historian.”

“I think she would.”

“You portray her basically in a good light, as far as I can tell, or at least, you don’t treat...