History

Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici purchased the property in 1417, converting a working farmstead into a country residence. His son Cosimo the Elder — who made the Medici the dominant power in Florence through banking rather than arms — preferred Careggi’s informality to the more ceremonial settings of Palazzo Medici. He commissioned Michelozzo to add a proper loggia and rationalise the courtyard between 1457 and 1459, though the medieval tower and farmhouse character were preserved. Cosimo spent increasing amounts of time here as his health declined and died at Careggi on 1 August 1464 — the first ruler of Florence to die a natural death after a full reign in decades.

His grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent continued the tradition, using Careggi as a retreat from the pressures of Florentine politics. The philosopher Marsilio Ficino, whose Latin translations of Plato and the Hermetic texts inaugurated Renaissance Neoplatonism, lived in a house provided by Lorenzo near the villa and hosted the informal gatherings of the Platonic Academy here — discussions that drew the young Pico della Mirandola, the poet Poliziano, and Cristoforo Landino. When news arrived of the fall of Negroponte to the Ottomans in 1470, Lorenzo was reportedly at Careggi; he is said to have received news of the loss of Chalcis — the last significant Venetian outpost in Greece — here in the garden.

Lorenzo died at Careggi on 8 April 1492, attended by Ficino, Poliziano and the young Savonarola, who later claimed to have urged him to repentance. After the Medici exile in 1494, the villa fell into decay; it was later used as a military barracks and eventually incorporated into the hospital complex that now surrounds it. The hospital restored the Michelozzo loggia and courtyard in the 20th century.