Rucellai Palace

This guide to Florence's Rucellai Palace opens on a January evening in 1997, when someone knocked on a third-floor door and Alvise di Robilant, a count and former Sotheby's director, let them in without ever raising a hand in his own defense. It steps back through the case's odd details before turning to the building itself, commissioned in the 1440s by the merchant Giovanni Rucellai and faced with tiers of pilasters borrowed from the Colosseum, its facade still carrying his personal emblem in stone.