San Antonio College Library

Only a few families have ever possessed the wealth, influence and fascination of the Medici. In this enormously readable biography, Christopher Hibbert tells of the famous Florentine banking family who provided the world with some of its most colorful soldiers, art patrons, collectors, builders, popes, statesmen and scholars ...

A tale of one family's ambition and of Europe's struggle to emerge from the ravages of the Dark Ages. The Medici used charm, skill and ruthlessness to garner unparalleled wealth and power, ruling Europe for more than 300 years.

With Pandora, Anne Rice began a magnificent new series of Vampire novels. Now, in the second of her New Tales of the Vampires, she tells the mesmerizing story of a Vampire in the Italian Age of Gold. Vittorio, educated in the Florence of Cosimo de' Medici, trained in knighthood at his father's mountaintop castle, inhabits a world of courtly splendor & country splendor & country pleasures-a world suddenly shattered when his entire family is destroyed...

"Magnifico is a vividly colorful portrait of Lorenzo de' Medici, the uncrowned ruler of Florence during its golden age. A true "Renaissance man," Lorenzo dazzled contemporaries with his prodigious talents and magnetic personality. Known to history as Il Magnifico (the Magnificent), Lorenzo was not only the foremost patron of his day but also a renowned poet, equally adept at composing philosophical verses and obscene rhymes to be sung at Carnival....

"The House of Medici or Famiglia de' Medici (/mdti/ MED-i-chee; Italian pronunciation: [de m?diti]) was a political dynasty, banking family and later royal house that first began to gather prominence under Cosimo de' Medici in the Republic of Florence during the late 14th century."--Wikipedia.

"Ruler of Florence for seven bloody years, 1531 to 1537, Alessandro de' Medici was arguably the first person of color to serve as a head of state in the Western world. Born out of wedlock to a dark-skinned maid and Lorenzo de' Medici, he was the last legitimate heir to the line of Lorenzo the Magnificent. When Alessandro's noble father died of syphilis, the family looked to him. Groomed for power, he carved a path through the backstabbing world of...

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family's Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter's abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra's parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older...

"The Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings-the dazzling handiwork of the city's skilled artists and architects. But equally important for the centuries to follow were geniuses of a different sort: Florence's manuscript hunters, scribes, scholars, and booksellers, who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and, through the discovery and diffusion of ancient knowledge, imagined a new and enlightened...