Local newspapers have been abuzz lately over a recent discovery made by history professor Marcello Simonetta, who taught a new class on Machiavelli for us this past semester. The discovery relates to the famous Pazzi Conspiracy, a savage episode in Florentine history when members of the Pazzi family tried to displace the Medici as rulers of Florence.
On April 26, 1478, an assassination attempt took place against Lorenzo the Magnificent and his brother Giuliano during High Mass inside the Duomo of Florence. Lorenzo was wounded but survived. His brother, having been stabbed 19 times, did not. Some 80 suspected conspirators were later executed, some by hanging from the windows of the Palazzo della Signoria.
One of these was Antonio Maffei da Volterra whose detailed, page-and-a-half-long signed confession Professor Simonetta discovered in the Florence State Archives on the Ides of March this year. As he recounts in the national newspaper La Repubblica, “I confess I did not believe my eyes when I read it the first time, and I thought it was an archival hallucination. But no, it was really him, who was writing under ‘crazy’ pressure [pazzi = crazy] before they cut off his ears and nose and hung him from a noose!”