Fortezza da Basso

This guide to Fortezza da Basso in Florence opens on Epiphany night, 1537, with a young duke waiting alone in a Florence apartment for a woman his own cousin had promised to bring him, having sent his guards away at that cousin's urging. It steps back to the siege that returned the Medici to power and the enormous brick pentagon Duke Alessandro ordered built to protect himself from the city he ruled, raised in barely three years by the architect Antonio da Sangallo the Younger. Look up at the Cassero keep still rising ahead of you as you cross the moat.