For three days the feasting and dancing, the displays and theatricals continued, until, on the Tuesday morning, the bride went to the basilica of San Lorenzo to hear Mass, carrying ‘a little book of Our Lady, a wonderful book written in letters of gold on dark blue paper and covered with crystal and graven silver’.
How beautiful is youth – as Lorenzo wrote in one of his poems – youth which is so soon over and gone; let him who would be happy, seize the moment; for tomorrow may never come:
Quant’è bella giovinezza
Che si fugge tuttavia!
Chi vuol esser lieto, sia;
Di doman turn c’è certezza.
Lorenzo’s young contemporaries eagerly followed his advice. There were dances by day and firework parties at night Lorenzo himself would be up at dawn, riding out into the forest, his long-bow slung on his back. After dark, he would join groups of his friends, roaming the streets by moonlight and serenading with songs and verses the girls at the palace windows. Once, at two o’clock on a cold winter morning (Lorenzo himself was on a visit to Pisa at the time, and was told this by his friend Filippo Corsini), a great crowd of them gadiered in the snow outside the palace of Marietta, the delightful, wayward, orphaned daughter of Lorenzo di Palla Strozzi. By the light of flaming torches, and with much singing, shouting, blowing of trumpets and piping of flutes, they began hurling snowballs at her window. Marietta threw it open;
and what a triumph when one of the besiegers succeeded in flinging snow upon the maiden’s face, as white as the snow itself… Moreover, Marietta herself, so graceful and so skilled in this game, and beautiful, as everyone knows, acquitted herself with very great honour.
The early years of Lorenzo’s inheritance were notable in Florence for a succession of entertainments: pageants, tournaments, masques, spectacles and parades; musical festivals, revels, dances and amusements of every kind. For generations, indeed, Florence had been famous all over Europe for such festivities. No city had more spectacular nor more numerous public entertainments. Thanks to the statutes of the various trade guilds there were no more than about 275 working-days in a year, so that the people had plenty of opportunity to enjoy themselves. There were carnivals, horse races and football games, dances in the Mercato Vecchio, mock battles in the Piazza Santa Croce and water displays beneath the bridges of the Arno. Sometimes the Piazza della Signoria would be turned into a circus or a hunting-field; wild animals would be let loose; boars would be goaded by lances; and the Commune’s lions would be brought out of their cage behind the Palazzo and incited – rarely successfully – to set upon dogs. On one occasion at least these escapades got out of hand: three men were killed by a rampaging buffalo, and afterwards a mare was set loose among stallions, a sight which one citizen thought the ‘most marvellous entertainment for girls to behold’, but which in the opinion of another, more respectable diarist, ‘much displeased decent and well-behaved people’.
One of the most popular of all Florentine festivals was that of Calendimaggio, May Day. For this, the young men got up early to hang branches of flowering shrubs, decorated with ribbons and sugared nuts, on the doors of their sweethearts’ houses; and the girls, wearing pretty frocks and carrying flowers and leaves, danced to the music of lutes in the Piazza Santa Trinità. Then there was the festival of St John the Baptist, patron of the city, when all the shops were decorated with streamers and banners; when riderless horses, with spiked iron balls hanging at their sides, raced from Porta al Prato down the Via della Vigna through the Mercato Vecchio and the Corso to Porta alla Croce; when processions of canons and choristers, of citizens dressed as angels and saints, and of huge decorated chariots passed through the streets bearing the Cathedral’s sacred relics, which included a thorn of the Holy Crown, a nail of the Holy Cross, and the thumb of St John; when the Piazza del Duomo was covered with blue canopies emblazoned with silver stars beneath which votive offerings of painted wax were taken to the Baptistery; and when, in the Piazza della Signoria, the most elaborate gilded castles, symbolizing the towns which were subject to Florence, were carried on wagons past the banners fluttering on the balcony of the Palazzo.
The Lenten festivals were naturally more sombre. On the Wednesday of Passion Week, the Matins of Darkness was held in the Cathedral. All the lights, save a single candle on the altar, were snuffed out; and in the gloom the clergy and congregation ritually beat on the floor with willow rods. On Maundy Thursday, the Archbishop washed the feet of the poor. And on Good Friday, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the vergers of all the churches and convents went out into the streets with wooden clappers summoning the people to kneel and pray wherever they were and whatever they were doing. Afterwards Christ’s funeral was enacted, through streets hung with black. A long procession of monks carried a cross and a scourging post, a crown of thorns, a spear and a sponge, together with every object mentioned in the stories of the Passion, from hammers and nails to purple robe and dice. Behind them was borne the figure of the dead Christ beneath a canopy of black velvet and gold; then came the Virgin Mary, clothed in black, a white handkerchief in her hand. The next day, Holy Saturday, all was bright once more. The black cloth was stripped from the altar of the Cathedral and replaced with gold. The Archbishop sang Gloria in Excelsis; and as doves released from the Cathedral fluttered to the rooftops of the Piazza del Duomo, the bells in the campanile and all over Florence rang out triumphantly.
Lorenzo and Giuliano delighted in all these festivities, in helping to design the tableaux, the backcloths and trappings, the sculptures and armour, the costumes of the performers and the elaborate harnesses and disguises of the scented animals. They delighted, too, in composing dramas and pageants into which were introduced those classical allusions so treasured by their contemporaries; and in discussing with scholars and poets the speeches which were to be delivered, the songs which were to be sung, the extravagant verse expositions of the allegorical masques.
Every distinguished visitor to the city was sure to be entertained extravagantly during his stay. Thus, when a great procession of noblemen from the south rode into Florence on 22 June 1473 as escort to the King of Naples’s daughter, Eleonora, who was on her way to be married to Duke Ercole of Ferrara, the Florentines eagerly seized the opportunity to welcome them in their customary style. They cheered and clapped as the Princess, dressed in black velvet and adorned with’ numberless pearls and jewels’, rode through the Porta Romana, across the Ponte Vecchio and up to the Palazzo della Signoria where she received an address from the assembled Priori before proceeding to the Medici Palace to have dinner with Lorenzo, Giuliano and their numerous guests. The next day a masque and brilliant procession were followed by a firework display; and on 24 June there was fête champêtre on the Prato, the meadow which stretched down to the banks of the Arno, where the guests ate strawberries, walked in the green grass by the water’s edge, and danced in the sunlight, jumping and leaping about in the energetic Florentine manner.