The Medici Bride

Giuliana Orsini arrived in Florence on the feast day of San Giovanni, when the city blazed with torches and the Arno reflected a thousand flames. She was seventeen, betrothed to a man she had never met, and determined to hate every moment of her new life.

The Medici palazzo rose before her like a monument to ambition, its rusticated stone facade announcing to the world that its inhabitants had clawed their way to power and intended to stay. Giuliana had been raised among Roman nobility, taught to look down upon merchant families no matter how wealthy they had become.

But Lorenzo de' Medici was not what she expected.

He met her in the courtyard, surrounded by sculptures that seemed to breathe with life. He was not handsome—his jaw too prominent, his nose crooked from a childhood accident—but when he spoke about the marble figures surrounding them, his face transformed into something remarkable.

"Donatello carved this when he was eighty years old," Lorenzo said, running his fingers along a bronze David with the intimacy of someone touching a living thing. "Art is the only immortality worth seeking, don't you think?"

Giuliana had been prepared to respond with cool indifference. Instead, she found herself genuinely curious.