The Medici Villas

The Medici Villas – Love, Power, and Art

by Sven Rech | SWR | 2026

 
The Medici left an indelible mark on Florence with their immense cultural wealth: they patronized artists such as Donatello, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Leonardo da Vinci, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Their magnificent yet relatively unknown villas around Florence still tell the story of their former inhabitants’ passions: of murder and manslaughter as well as of great, forbidden love. And of one final, significant gift from the family to Florence—and to the entire world: the will of Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici, to whom we owe the greatest art treasure of the Renaissance.