Palazzo Busini-Bardi (your home)

Built in the 1420s for the Busini wool merchants and traditionally attributed to Brunelleschi himself, this is one of the earliest Renaissance palazzi: heavy stone and shopfronts below, the family's tall-windowed piano nobile above, staff quarters on top, all wrapped around a cooling courtyard.

By the mid-1400s it passed to the Bardi, the banking family whose bad loan to Edward III of England helped crash European finance in the 1340s. In the 1570s Count Giovanni de' Bardi hosted the Camerata here: the theorist Vincenzo Galilei (Galileo's father), the singers Caccini and Peri, the poet Rinuccini. Trying to resurrect sung Greek tragedy, they invented monody, recitative, and finally opera itself: Peri's Dafne (1598) is counted the first opera ever written.

Vincenzo tested music theory in this circle with real experiments, hanging weights from lute strings, some of the earliest experimental physics on record. His son Galileo grew up inside that habit of testing authority against evidence.