Giuliano de' Ricci e la cultura antiquaria e filologica a Firenze nel secondo Cinquecento. Una nota per la fortuna delle opere di Machiavelli

The paper aims to examine a text by one of Niccolò Machiavelli’s grandchildren, Giuliano de’ Ricci (1543-1606), called Delle casate et famiglie fiorentine. Preserved in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, de’ Ricci’s work is a monumental priorista consisting of four manuscript volumes in folio, each of them devoted to a specific quarter of Florence. In Delle casate et famiglie fiorentine not only does the author describe more than eight hundred lineages, he also gathers a wealth of information from a wide set of sources about the role played in Florentine history by the members of each ‘house’. The first part of the paper concentrates on de Ricci’s connections in the Florentine intellectual milieux of the second half of the sixteenth century; in particular, new light is shed on his association with the classical scholar Piero Vettori (1499-1585), whose house de’ Ricci had the frequent opportunity to visit thanks to his 1571 marriage with Vettori’s grand-daughter Lisabetta, as well as with don Vincenzio Borghini (1515-1580), spedalingo of the Innocenti, whose philological teachings (mostly devoted to texts in the vernacular) and method of historical and genealogical survey were undoubtedly inspirational for Ricci. In the second part of the paper new materials are made available related to the Segretario fiorentino and his writings, which de’ Ricci’ included in his priorista but have so far been largely neglected by Machiavelli scholars.