Never did the Florentines pass such a summer. Every day brought some entertainment more magnificent than that of the day before, and the Palazzo Pitti resounded with music and gaiety. In October arrived the Cardinal Aldobrandini, sent by the Pope to perform the marriage ceremony. Don Antonio de’ Medici met him some miles outside the city at the head of five hundred cavalry, and at the town gate he was received by the Grand Duke under a velvet baldaquin, who escorted him, walking on his left, to the palace. Cannon fired, trumpets sounded and people cheered, as the Cardinal, followed by high dignitaries of the Church and an enormous train of barons and cavaliers, passed through Florence. On the 5th October Ferdinando I., as proxy for the King of France, espoused his niece, Maria de’ Medici, and the inventive talents of Buontalenti and of Giovanni da Bologna were taxed to the utmost to provide extraordinary and unheard-of feasts and entertainments. The former painted and arranged the wonderful scenery for Rinuccini’s _Eurydice_, which was performed in the big saloon, with music by Jacopo Peri, the inventor of recitative and the forerunner of Pergolesi, Jomelli and Cimarosa. Eight years later the palace witnessed yet more splendid entertainments in honour of the marriage of Ferdinando’s eldest son Cosimo with Maria Maddalena of Austria, and but a few months afterwards Ferdinando died, and his body lay in state in the large hall of the palace. During the brief reign of Cosimo II., Giulio Parigi, according to Baldinucci, added to Palazzo Pitti on either side “by a design of regal magnificence.” He increased Brunelleschi’s façade from seven windows to thirteen; and his son, Alfonso, who succeeded him as chief architect under Ferdinando II., again lengthened the palace by two large windows on the ground floor on either side and five on the first, in which state it remained for more than a hundred years, as can be seen in the engraving by Zocchi, done in 1746. It was fortunate that so clever and resourceful a man as Alfonso Parigi was court architect, for Baldinucci tells us that “about 1640 the façade of the oldest part of the Palazzo Pitti, from the second floor upwards, was seen to be out of the perpendicular, inclining towards the Piazza more than 8 inches. This might have been very serious had not Alfonso with talent, knowledge and prompt courage, suggested a radical and efficacious remedy, and effected it by drawing back the colossal wall, faced with huge rustic stones, to its original place; securing it in such manner that it might never again present so alarming a spectacle, and he did it in this way. First he bored the wall of the façade in as many places as were needful for placing certain large iron ties made on purpose by Pietro Zaballi, a famous worker in iron of that time; these were secured with the usual bars, only very big and strong, which afterwards were hidden under the stone facing.