PREFACE
 

In searching for and collecting notices and reminiscences

of the buildings in the city of Florence and old Florentine

customs, the Diary of Luca Landucci can certainly not be

neglected by anyone who has lately seen modern scholars

discover and bring to light curious, unknown and interest¬

ing notices, only made use of at times by past generations.

No sooner had I advanced some way in reading this book,

than  I perceived that I had in my hands not a confused

mixture, from which one  could extract and prize  a few

individual recollections,  but a true and exact chronicle,

most  varied and minute. Varied, indeed, inasmuch as the

writer, whilst giving us notices of many domestic facts, of

political events, of  fetes,  of  those men of his day who

excelled in any art, of any extraordinary phenomena, and

of the magnificent buildings which were then being erected,

represents to us vividly the public and private life of the

second half of the fifteenth century, and of the first and

most  splendid years of the sixteenth century. Most minute

also,  because  the  facts, especially the political  ones are

generally noted day  by day, and not all at once as, often

to the detriment of lucidity, they are registered by his¬

torians. I found, in  fact,  a book which, when confronted

with others of the same kind and of the same date,  much

resembles the so-called Storie of  Giovanni Cambi, for the

unsuitable publication  of which I ask myself whether

the Carmelite  friar, Father  Ildefonso di San  Luigi,  has

been pardoned even  in the other world. Landucci is  much

pleasanter reading, inasmuch as he does not, like Cambi,

intermingle the narration  of facts with the registration

of the  names of  the Gonfalieri and Priori  who   were

appointed  every half-year; a series of magistrates which

one can reconstruct  more  authentically from so many

sources. With the recollection of having read in Macchiavelli

that,  "if there is anything which pleases and instructs us

in history, it  is that which is  described in detail,"  I set

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