Ricordi

Bonaccorso Pitti (1354-1432) was a merchant, politician and ambassador, entrusted by the Republic of Florence with difficult missions to the kings of France and the emperor. He has long been the object of fascination for Italian and foreign scholars. Seduced by his multifaceted, passionate and often self-centred personality, many of them saw Bonaccorso as a precursor, among others, of Benvenuto Cellini and Casanova. His gambling skills, for example, or the autobiographical drive animating many of his pages have been therefore emphasized, at the expense of a global reading of both Bonaccorso’s Ricordi and his personality. It is precisely with the desire to invite readers to an integral and duly contextualized reflection that Firenze University Press has entrusted Veronica Vestri with a new edition of this famous 'family book', with a brief introduction by Stefano U. Baldassarri. The two of them place the book within the genre it belongs to, thus highlighting its motifs and purposes, both characterized by the prudent and tenacious concreteness which is typical of Florence’s Renaissance.