It is above all the city's Renaissance art and architecture that draws visitors to Florence. Those calming vistas were no less precious in the 15th century when they were erected against the disorder that plagued the real Florence: the violent, chaotic city that Lauro Martines has brought to life in April Blood, a history of the conspiracy that very nearly took the life of the young Lorenzo de' Medici before he had a chance to become the 'Magnifico' of legend. Martines describes his book as a work of political history, but April Blood is most compellingly political in that it tells the story of a polity, a city state, poised between the last days of a constitutional republic and the republic's takeover by a dynasty of merchant bankers bent on becoming lords.

LRB 7 August 2003 | PDF Download