Francesco di Piero Guicciardini (1478-1540), also known as Francesco ‘the historian’, is by far the most famous member of the Guicciardini family from Florence. Close friend of Niccolò Macchiavelli, important advisor of several popes in Rome, a leading force in the election of Duke Cosimo I as the successor of the murdered Duke Alessandro in 1537, but most notable of all, the writer of the Storia d’Italia: a series of twenty books describing the – then – modern history of the Italian peninsula. It was published posthumously for the first time in 1561 by his nephew Agnolo di Girolamo Guicciardini (1525-1581) and it was to be this publication that gave him an everlasting fame as a historian and political thinker.
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