Ingeborg Walter

The Florentine banking family Strozzi's name has a telling meaning: The stranglers. Nomen est omen. While the family was obviously highly successful in the field of finance, its members were repeatedly defeated in the field of politics by the more powerful Medici clan. Various members of the Strozzi family were forced into exile and built their fortunes abroad in Naples, Brugge and Barcelona. Perhaps it was precisely the shift from politics to finance that made their commercial ventures so show more successful. Despite their success abroad, the family pined to be restored to prominence among the leading families of Florence, a task they succeeded in by supporting the Medici clan and entering into marriage alliances with them. The Palazzo Strozzi, approved by the Medicis and similar in design to their Palazzo Medici, is the architectural proof of this assimilation.

Ingeborg Walter has written a splendid biography of three generations of the Strozzi family living during the turbulences of 15th and 16th century Italy. show less

Ingeborg Walter is a congenial cultural ambassador fluent in Italian and German. Her biography of Lorenzo de' Medici is a sumptuous portrait of the man and his times. Art and culture is her forte (and covers about half the book, essentially Lorenzo's youth), but the political history is also aptly presented. I wish she had elaborated more on the economic decline of the Medici businesses. Lorenzo's stato was the flower and the ruin of his family's control over Florence. Could better show more management and less diplomatic interventions and grandstanding have preserved it? Or was Italian commerce doomed, to be supplanted by Dutch merchants? Recommended reading. show less

Ein lesenswerter und ziemlich umfassender Abriss über Zeit und Leben dieses berühmte(ste)n Medici.