Florence Under the Medici, 1434–1492 | Calm Bedtime History

It is September 1434. Cosimo de' Medici, sixty years old, richest citizen of Florence, rides through the Porta al Prato after a year of exile in Venice and Padua. The bells of San Giovanni are ringing. He does not enter as a conqueror. He walks home to the Via Larga, past the unfinished cathedral with its gaping hole where the dome should rise, past workshops where bronze founders stoke their furnaces and painters grind lapis lazuli to powder. The republic still stands. The Signoria still meets. Yet everything has shifted.