The palazzo was built as the private residence of the Medici family in the 1440s and was the fulcrum of the family’s life until the move to Palazzo Vecchio in 1540. It was the home of Cosimo the Elder: it was here that Lorenzo and Giuliano passed their days and that Alessandro de’ Medici was made the first Duke of Florence. From the bench along the facade on the street and the original loggia, ‘for the comfort and gathering of citizens’ (but later incorporated into the palace structure), to the elegant inner courtyard and the kitchen garden, later the formal garden, the tour follows the path of an anonymous compiler of inventories who lived in the late 1400s, to explore cellars, private apartments, chapels and scriptoriums, ‘munitiones’, attics and terraces, all to discover, thanks to texts and images but also sounds and scents – ‘fragments of a Medicean discourse’ which still today, quite rightly, is nothing less than ‘magnificent’.