“At times, it is easier to face the dragon
“At times, it is easier to face the dragonthan to slay it.”
than to slay it.”They looked up before the palazzo that Cosimo I had built, the Medici palazzo. It punctuated the intersection of the Via de Gori and the Via Larga where it bent slightly to the right, at the corner with the Via de’ Gori. As one approached, the palazzo’s form elongated diagonally, as if reaching out to the baptistery and cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. Palazzos in the Santa Maria Novella quarter of Florence were not merely palazzos but communes, connected blocks of palazzos inhabited by those who could afford to build them.
Here it had stood, this new incarnation of it, for not quite fifty years. Brunelleschi had submitted a design, only to have Cosimo instantly rej
