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the love of God during prayer. A fictional Pazzi appeared in the twentieth century, when the writer Thomas Harris made one of his main characters in the novel
Hannibal
a Pazzi, a Florentine police inspector who gains fame and notoriety by solving the case of the Monster of Florence.
    The death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, in 1492, at the height of the Renaissance, ushered in one of those bloody periods that marked Florentine history. A Dominican monk by the name of Savonarola, who lived in the monastery of San Marco, consoled Lorenzo on his deathbed, only later to turn and preach against the Medici family. Savonarola was a strange-looking man, hooded in brown monk’s robes, magnetic, coarse, ungainly, and muscular, with a hook nose and Rasputin-like eyes. In the San Marco church he began to preach fire and brimstone, railing against the decadence of the Renaissance, proclaiming that the Last Days had come, and recounting his visions and his direct conversations with God.
    His message resonated among common Florentines, who had watched with disapproval the conspicuous consumption and great wealth of the Renaissance and its patrons, much of which seemed to have bypassed them. Their discontent was magnified by an epidemic of syphilis, carried back from the New World, which burned through the city. It was a disease Europe had never seen before, and it came in a far more virulent form than we know today, in which the victim’s body became overspread with weeping pustules, the flesh sagging and falling from the face, the stricken sinking into fulminating insanity before death mercifully carried them off. The year 1500 was approaching, which seemed to some a nice round figure marking the arrival of the Last Days. In this climate Savonarola found a receptive audience.
    In 1494, Charles VIII of France invaded Tuscany. Piero the Unfortunate, who had inherited the rule of Florence from his father, Lorenzo, was an arrogant and ineffective ruler. He surrendered the city to Charles on poor terms, without even putting up a decent fight, which so enraged Florentines that they drove out the Medici family and looted their palaces. Savonarola, who had accumulated a large following, stepped into the power vacuum and declared Florence a “Christian Republic,” setting himself up as its leader. He immediately made sodomy, a popular and more or less socially acceptable activity among sophisticated Florentines, punishable by death. Transgressors and others were regularly burned in the central Piazza della Signoria or hanged outside the city gates.
    The mad monk of San Marco had free reign to stir up religious fervor among the common people in the city. He railed against the decadence, excess, and humanistic spirit of the Renaissance. A few years into his reign, he instigated his famous Bonfires of the Vanities. He sent his minions around door to door, collecting items he thought were sinful—mirrors, pagan books, cosmetics, secular music and musical instruments, chessboards, cards, fine clothes, and secular paintings. Everything was heaped up in the Piazza della Signoria and set afire. The artist Botticelli, who fell under the sway of Savonarola, added many of his own paintings to the bonfire, and several of Michelangelo’s works may also have been torched, along with other priceless Renaissance masterpieces.
    Under Savonarola’s rule, Florence sank into economic decline. The Last Days he kept preaching never came. Instead of blessing the city for its newfound religiosity, God seemed to have abandoned it. The common people, especially the young and shiftless, began openly defying his edicts. In 1497, a mob of young men rioted during one of Savonarola’s sermons; the riots spread and became a general revolt, taverns reopened, gambling resumed, and dancing and music could once again be heard echoing down Florence’s crooked streets.
    Savonarola, his control slipping, preached ever more wild and condemnatory sermons, and he made the fatal