Look up, along the top of the buildings by the river, and you'll see it — a long covered passage riding on brackets and little arches, running above the street and out toward the old bridge, with no visible way in from down here. That is the Vasari Corridor, and it is the purest thing the Medici ever built. Because its entire purpose was to let them not be around you.
Cosimo the First ordered it in fifteen sixty-five, and the occasion was a wedding — his son Francesco was marrying an Austrian archduchess, and the family wanted a grand gesture for the celebrations. So Cosimo told Vasari to connect the government offices, on that side of the river, to the family's new palace, all the way over on the far side. In private. Above the crowd. And Vasari built the whole thing — half a mile of elevated hallway, threading over rooftops, curving around a stubborn tower whose owners refused to let it be knocked down, and crossing clean over the top of the shops on the old bridge — in about five m
onths. A private aerial road across an entire city, thrown up in a single summer, so the family could walk from work to home without ever setting foot in their own streets.
Think about what that passage let them avoid. No crowds. No petitioners grabbing at their sleeves. No assassin waiting in an alley — and the Medici took that threat very seriously, because they'd already had one brother butche
