Bernardo Rucellai

Messer Bernardo Rucellai stands near the top of Florence's social order, a man whose hospitality gathers the city's best talkers into one green enclosure where politics, philosophy, and poetry braid together. His gardens are the novel's early salon — the place where Tito's charm first shines and where the moral weather of Florence can be read in a single afternoon. He matters because he embodies the older, humanist Florence that Savonarola's fire and the French wars will soon press against, and because the fate of men like him becomes the measure of what the city is willing to sacrifice.